HotelTonight is the only hotel booking application made for mobile from the ground up; it offers great pricing for last-minute deals at top hotels vetted personally by its staff.

Background:

In 2011, Battery—a firm with a long history of investing in hospitality technology–was intrigued to uncover HotelTonight, a mobile-only, hotel-booking application positioned to capture the “same-day bookings” slice (roughly 15% and growing) of the annual hotel-room market, worth $650 billion at the time. However, this unique travel business was buried inside a private, profitable company with no need or appetite for a venture investment.

Battery’s Impact:

• The Battery team worked to spin the group out of its parent, collaborating with the management team to define a new strategy and make a compelling case to the existing board for a free-standing company that could attack a ripe market opportunity.
• Battery led the financing effort, seeding the business and expanding the syndicate with new investors for both seed and series A financings.
• On the board, Battery worked side-by-side with the HotelTonight team on executive hiring, product development and financing. All of this helped drive strong global growth over the next several years.

Outcome:

In 2016, HotelTonight hit profitability and, at that time, could be found across the globe and was used by consumers worldwide. Airbnb acquired HotelTonight in March 2019.