After growing over 600% since the start of the pandemic, the company begins selling its software that successfully powers its managed hotels.
NEW YORK – Life House, the all-in-one hotel operations platform and one of the fastest-growing hotel companies in the U.S., announced raising $60 million in Series C financing led by new investors KAYAK and Inovia Capital with participation from investors Tiger Global, Derive Ventures, JLL, Trinity Ventures, Sound Ventures, Cooley LLP among others.
Life House plans to use these new funds to continue building a market-leading cloud-based hotel management platform that empowers independent hotels of all sizes with operational autonomy and optimized financial performance. The company will also continue to invest in improving and growing its white-label management platform, which organically benefits from innovations in its software.
Life House began as a hotel brand and operator for independent hotels, using its software to become the best operator and demonstrating its expertise with an award winning brand. Now, after significant investment from prior rounds, that software is comprehensive and mature enough to sell directly to hoteliers and operators that want to own the on-site management of the hotels.
Life House currently manages the operations of more than 50 hotels in North America powered by its software platform that has consistently increased its hotels profitability by nearly 200% and net revenues by over 45%. Given its differentiated position as a hotel manager and software developer, the company is the customer of its own tech and understands its customers intimately.
“We’ve always been on the mission to build operationally autonomous hotels by developing software that makes hotels maximally profitable and easy to operate,” said Founder & CEO, Rami Zeidan, who had seen the problem firsthand after a decade at some of the industry’s top hotel operating and investment firms. “After seeing the results of our powerful software on our managed hotels, we’re excited to increase our impact by sharing it more broadly to other independent hotel owners who are underserved by the solutions that exist today.”
Operating hotels is complex and multi-faceted, with very few groups able to succeed at all aspects of an operation. Since its founding in 2017, Life House has been focused on making it easy for anyone to own, create, and operate any hotel of any shape or size and do so maximally profitably. Life House’s all-in-one platform is designed to be a one-stop-shop for any independent hotel owner with any size hotel or level of expertise – from revenue management and dynamic pricing, to financial reporting and accounting, to full-on management, branding and design.
The company’s software platform leverages great API-first products in the market in the creation of a comprehensive platform for core business functions. Today the company’s three core systems power 1) revenue management, 2) financial operations, and 3) property operations.
Revenue Management & Marketing Software powers all revenue management from pricing, to metasearch marketing, to distribution – driving 45% higher net RevPAR and 70% direct bookings
Financial Operations Software automates finance, accounting, reporting, budgeting, and forecasting functions to enable hotels to deliver accurate financial reporting with no headcount and to empower general managers and owners with actionable, intelligent reporting
Hotel Operations Software makes it easy for hourly staff like housekeepers and lobby attendants to do their job optimally without middle manager supervisors. “We’re not just automating back-office costs, we also make it very easy for anyone anywhere to be really good at their job, without training”, Zeidan added.
The powerful platform and unique approach has garnered the attention of savvy software investors. "Inovia has been investing in disruptive technology businesses in hospitality for over a decade and we’ve developed deep domain expertise in the space” Chris Arsenault, Partner at Inovia Capital said. “We were impressed by the platform Rami and the Life House team are building to empower independent hotel owners to compete globally, and we are excited to support them in their next phase of growth.”
The company has big plans for growth, as it hopes to leverage its partnership with KAYAK to share its operations platform globally in the near future. "We're reimagining the hotel experience with Life House as our software and operations partner," said Steve Hafner, KAYAK CEO. "Our investment will help accelerate innovation and the expansion of KAYAK’s hotel initiatives.”
"The company is initially focused on small and medium sized hotels where owners are particularly underserved, and which represents nearly half of the entire market, but has plans to grow out of that in good time. “We see a world where we ship iPads to hotels for staff to easily learn and operate autonomously in a matter of hours – and we’re not far from that,” said Zeidan.
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She holds a Bachelor's degree in Communication & Mass Media from Panteion University of Political & Social Studies of Athens and she has been editor and editor-in-chief in various economic magazines and newspapers.
