I first met Richard Valtr, the Mews co-founder, in 2018. He had this huge vision of building a cloud native platform to upend the slow moving hospitality industry. He’d experienced the problem first hand in trying to find the right tech tools for his family’s hotel. The software available was all on premise, impossible to integrate with, expensive and definitely not designed to be used by your average busy hotel manager.

I remember our first meeting well. Richard was all passion and vision, focused on building software for hotels to work in the background in smart and seamless ways. He was clear that tech shouldn’t replace what we love about hospitality, just make everything work better, delivering an improved experience for users and guests. He wanted to free hotel teams to deliver great guest experiences and give customers more time to relax and enjoy everything the hotel has to offer. 

Richard was on a mission to answer questions like: Why can’t you check in/out remotely? Why can’t you use your phone to access your room and pay your bill? Why do hotel staff, whose main role is face to face contact with guests, spend so much of their time staring at screens?  Why can’t you just pay for the time you use your room for rather than being a hostage to fixed check in/out times? Why should technology take away from the personal experience? 

These were great questions. But there was one small problem. Very little had been built! And Richard being such a visionary was so focused on the future that I worried how he would actually get stuff done. Then I met Matt Welle, his co-founder and CEO. Matt had been trained in the hospitality industry and was clearly a true operator who knew the industry inside out. The two complimented each other very well. They were a bit like a married couple - finishing each other's sentences, complaining about each other but always coming from a position of love and respect. We were thrilled to lead their Series A and begin our journey together as partners.

Fast forward six years and so much has changed but the vision remains the same, as relevant and compelling as ever. The company is now well established as the market leader amongst the next generation of cloud native players. They have more than 5000 hotels around the world, more than 1000 people, have soared past €100m in revenue and are still growing fast.

It has been great to see Richard and Matt growing as leaders and rising to every challenge. Unlike many European tech companies they have always seen this as a global opportunity and are unafraid to build a really big business. They have also assembled a very talented team around them who share their ambition and will ensure that the business can grow with confidence as it continues to fulfill its huge potential. 

Crucially, they have established themselves as the core system that hotels rely on to run their business. It’s business critical and the product is used as a driver of success as opposed to a necessary but unloved piece of software. If you establish your place as the core system that customers depend on, you have earned the right and the trust to move into adjacent markets and develop a more complete solution over time. 

This is exactly what Mews has done. They embedded payments into their product early on to streamline the payments flow; more recently they added a POS system as well as additional financial services such as lending. Their product now helps hotels manage multiple properties across the portfolio and also monetise any space or resource within the hotel. In addition to this, they have a thriving ecosystem of more than 1000 integration partners so customers can access a full range of apps in a more elegant way.

But what might be their greatest superpower is the company’s culture. Mews has tremendous entrepreneurial spirit and hard work built into its DNA. But they also have an amazing human side that binds the company together. These attributes, combined with such an exciting vision for the future, gives the team a powerful purpose and direction. The company’s culture underwrites everything they do and I believe will continue to be a key driver of their enduring success.

So much of what makes Mews a great company was on display during Covid. As you can imagine this was a very difficult time for the company with their market mostly closed for around two years. They had to make more than half the team redundant amounting to around 200 people. But they did it with empathy and care such that the people who left understood and the people who stayed were galvanized by the way the company handled it. They cut back spending in GTM but had the courage to continue to invest into their product believing that this would put them in a stronger position coming out the other side of the pandemic. And the really amazing thing was that their customers stayed. Mews had built strong relationships, delivered value and established themselves as the core platform that customers rely on to run their businesses. So much so that even during the hardest times imaginable, with their markets closed and no money coming in, hotels for the most part stayed with Mews and many new customers actually joined them. The company demonstrated leadership, courage, resilience and real human empathy under the most difficult circumstances. And at the same time customers, desperate to cut costs in any way they could, stayed loyal to the company and the product.

The company has made great strides towards their vision to transform the hospitality industry and enable its practitioners to face the future with confidence. But there is still so much further to go and I’m convinced that their best years are ahead. They have still only captured a small share of the overall market opportunity. An opportunity that includes further developing their product breadth and capability and also moving into more and more countries around the world.

I’m confident that Mews has all the attributes to become a truly generational software company that will do more than anyone else to power the hospitality industry into the 21st century. Notion Capital is a very proud investor and we’re thrilled to be on this journey with Richard, Matt and the entire team of Mewsers.

To read more about this news read the piece on Fortune here.