Hotel room pricing tech firm becomes latest unicorn

A software company helping hotels to set the prices of their rooms has become Britain’s latest unicorn company after raising $370 million (£293 million) from the American private equity titan KKR.
Lighthouse, which is based in London and was founded by two Belgian entrepreneurs, supports 70,000 hotels and rental accommodation providers from the likes of the Radisson, Accor and IHG, which owns brands such as InterContinental, to small B&Bs.
The deal is understood to value Lighthouse at more than $1 billion, a valuation that is colloquially known as unicorn status. Sources close to the company suggested that it would generate annual revenues of more than £79 million this year, significantly up on the £42.5 million achieved last year.
It plans to use the cash to further develop its AI-powered data analysis software and to expand internationally, including through acquisitions.
Sean Fitzpatrick, its chief executive, described the company as a “12-year overnight success” — the business was founded by Matthias Geeroms and Gino Engels in 2012 — and said that since 2021 it had begun to build its reputation in the highly fragmented market for travel technology services.
“There is a unique characteristic of travel tech where you have a very small number of behemoths, the likes of Amadeus and Oracle, where they have a very significant market share,” he said. The Spanish firm Amadeus IT Group posted revenues of €5.4 billion (£4.5 billion) in 2023.
Fitzpatrick, 52, said: “Then you have this huge chasm to a vibrant start-up ecosystem, where very few platforms manage to break through. It is a fragmented market.
“[KKR have invested] because we have broken through and we are getting to a scale now where we can really disrupt some of the incumbents. If you look at their revenue profiles these are massive businesses and it demonstrates there is a massive opportunity ahead.”
The company’s software helps property managers to plan their pricing for the year ahead, as well as to reprice their vacant rooms as often as they wish, based on likely demand, drawing on 300 million different travel and leisure market data points each day.
“We recommend you optimise your pricing at least four times a day,” Fitzpatrick said. “That’s probably sufficient to keep up with market dynamics.” He said that among the million-plus hotels worldwide “there is only maybe 5 per cent of those using a system like Lighthouse. In many cases it is still a highly manual process.”
Fitzpatrick said that surge pricing, where hotels lift prices significantly on dates for big events such as a Taylor Swift concert or a Formula 1 race, were a feature of the travel industry but not the norm and that hotel managers had a daily battle to make use of their rooms. Knowing that flights coming into London from Berlin in a month’s time were booking up fast, for example, could prompt them to promote their rooms to those travellers and secure their custom ahead of their rivals.
Lighthouse, which employs 700 people and traded as OTA Insight until a rebrand last year, made a pre-tax loss of £3.9 million last year. It previously raised $80 million from investors in 2021.
KKR said it saw potential for Lighthouse to become a significant player in the $15 billion travel and hospitality technology market. It is best known for its investment in large companies and its $25 billion acquisition of the conglomerate RJR Nabisco in 1989 is chronicled in the book Barbarians At The Gate.