Leadership Lessons From the Founder of $2.5 Billion Hotel-Tech Unicorn Mews

Small business takeaway: 

• A former hotel night receptionist turned boutique hotel operator, Richard Valtr founded hospitality software startup Mews after seeing how clunky systems pulled staff away from guests. His leadership lessons apply across industries: build for what customers and employees actually do all day (not what you assume they do); treat trust as the product when you handle clients’ money and core operations; and expand by adding complementary partners without diluting the experience. Break silos, share ownership, and stay flexible.

As innovators around the world rush to create a new paradigm that integrates artificial intelligence with software-as-a-service tools, Richard Valtr, Founder of Mews, has developed a model for the hotel and hospitality industry that has attracted $710 million from global investors, boosting the startup’s market valuation to $2.5 billion.

Mews’ cloud-based property management platform for hoteliers is an end-to-end solution. Not only does it takes care of all back-office functions—from housekeeping, booking, and payment processing to managing room inventory—it also uses AI and data analytics to increase hotel profitability and personalize guest stays. And, because it is an open API interface, it can integrate hundreds of third-party apps onto its platform including TripAdvisor and Expedia that hotels can use to customize operations, loyalty programs, and guest experiences.

Mews is also a fintech platform that not only helps hotels process payments, but through partners provides flexible financing to hotel operators so they can scale their businesses. 

Today, Mews software is used in 85 countries by over 15,000 hotels, including such brands as Airelles, Otter Hospitality, and The Social Hub. In 2025, properties on the Mews platform processed $19.7 billion in transactions

It’s not surprising leading venture capital firms, such as Atomico, Tiger Global, and Battery Ventures, are betting on the Amsterdam-based company’s future. 

That’s because the $23 billion global hospitality technology market is booming, driven by factors from the massive surge in AI to the growth in tourism, according to Polaris Market Research.

But competition in the hotel-tech industry is fierce. That is why it’s notable that Mews has been able to carve a firm foothold in the marketplace since its launch in 2012.

CO— spoke to Mews Founder Valtr to learn about the leadership skills he used to build his startup to unicorn status.

CO—: What inspired you to launch a cloud-based property management system designed for hospitality businesses?

RV: My dad is a programmer, and my mother is a serial entrepreneur who runs multiple businesses. She has been involved in hotel development in Prague, where I was born and raised. I worked as a night receptionist at one of the hotels she operated as a teenager and learned a bit about the hotel business. After studying at the University College London, I returned home to Prague to work with my family on real estate and hotel developments. That work culminated a few years later in the creation of The Emblem Prague Hotel, a luxury boutique property in the Old Town where I led the concept, design, and project management, and where I first understood that the traditional way hotels were run was fundamentally broken.

At that time, most hotels still ran on-site desktop systems. There was no cloud-native operating system that could run an entire hotel end-to-end in real time.

CO—: So how did you turn your product idea into reality?

RV: I knew some programming having learned a lot from my father. I hired two talented engineers from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague—Jan Široký, who became our CTO, and Jiří Helmich, who led product development—to help me develop a prototype. 

With that team, we built a cloud-native property management system from scratch, starting with online and kiosk check-in, and then expanding into a full property management system that could automate front desk operations in real time. 

We worked on the first version for over a year, and by 2013, The Emblem Prague Hotel became the first property to run entirely on Mews.

CO—: How did you fund your startup?

RV: It wasn’t easy since I was launching a startup in the Czech Republic in 2012, at a time when there were not many venture capital firms. Luckily, I found an angel investor—a friend of mine from my university days who had taken his company public on the London Stock Exchange. He put up roughly $250,000, which funded the company for three years. 

The following year I hired a CEO, Matthijs (Matt) Welle, who had spent a decade working at Hilton in such markets as London, Johannesburg, and Prague. He had extensive experience in the hospitality industry with direct insight into the need for more automated software. Matt was able to use his network of connections to help market Mews’ new cloud platform.

For the first few years, we bootstrapped the company. In late 2016, we raised our first institutional seed round of $1.6 million from Axivate Capital, which allowed us to accelerate hiring and expand beyond the Czech market. Two years later, we raised roughly $7 million in a Series A funding round, led by Notion Capital with participation from henQ and Thayer Ventures, which really kicked off our international growth.

After that, venture capital funding rounds kept increasing in size. [For example] Mews raised $33 million in a Series B round led by Battery Ventures in 2019, $185 million in a Series C fundraise led by Kinnevik and Goldman Sachs Asset Management in 2022, … and a $300 million venture capital round [this year] led by EQT Growth.

[Read more: 7 Winning Startups Share the (Adaptable) Secrets to Their Success]

CO—: How did you market your product in the early days and get hoteliers to buy it?

RV: We struggled in the early days, since were a fledgling venture in a market dominated by large competitors. In addition, it is a very fractured marketplace due to a proliferation of cloud-based vendors, and there are competitors in every single market. 

CO—: How did you grow your customer base over time?

RV: Landing our first customers wasn’t easy. Selling a property management system means handling a hotel’s most sensitive assets—their financial and operational data—so trust had to be earned, not assumed. Prospective customers were skeptical about buying a new product that was being used by family hotels.

What broke through was the simple idea that technology should get out of the way. No one goes to hotel school or finds passion for hospitality because of the systems they’ll use. They go in because they love people—the conversations, the connections, making someone feel at home. And no one wants their guests to stand in line at check-in. Automation that eliminates [hassle] isn’t a tech pitch; it’s a hospitality pitch. 

CO—: Tell us how you have used a mergers-and-acquisition strategy to enhance your business and expand business internationally.

RV: We have used an M&A strategy to expand our customer base globally by acquiring local technology companies that complement our product offering. These include Atomize, a Swedish-based revenue-management company that uses AI to track bookings, competitive room rates worldwide in real-time … and Nomi, a Nashville-based startup that developed a local tour guide for travelers that uses AI and predictive analytics to tailor recommendation requests for guests based on their unique preferences.

[Read more: Franchises Leverage Diverse Revenue Streams to Rev Up Sales and Weather Ups and Downs]

CO—: How are you now paying it forward by helping other startups in the hospitality industry?

RV: Two ways. We built Mews Marketplace as an open platform from day one, which means any developer can build on top of us and reach our customers. Today, the Marketplace has more than 1,000 [hospitality apps], and for many of those companies, Mews is a meaningful distribution channel into the hospitality industry.

The second is Mews Ventures, our M&A arm.

Our playbook is not to acquire and dismantle, but to integrate these companies bringing their products, customers, and teams into the Mews ecosystem to expand the platform’s capability for everyone involved. Around 80% of employees from acquired companies stay with Mews long-term, which means founders and their teams see their work scaled to a much broader audience than they could have reached independently.

CO—: What advice would you give other entrepreneurs looking to raise money for their startup? 

RV: Every founder must find their own way. For one, know exactly who you are building your product for—not a persona but a real person. I think about myself at 14, working in hospitality, hating the tools but loving the job. I remember the people I met and our conversations. That gap is what we’re solving at Mews—making the tools that people use to do their jobs fun, enjoyable, and interesting. If you can articulate your own gaps with that kind of clarity, investors feel it. 

Second, show that your platform has compounding logic. [For example] Mews is not just a SaaS company; we’re also a fintech platform. We help hotels process payments and, through strategic partners such as YouLend, access flexible financing to scale their business. Each layer makes the next more valuable. Investors want to see a growth engine.

And finally, pay attention to the details. In hospitality, details are everything. The task isn’t done when you close the dialogue window, but think about the follow-up: Did the guest receive the service they were expecting? 

The same is true for how you build a company and how you tell your story to investors. Delight is in the specifics, not in the pitch deck headlines.

CO—: What leadership lessons can other entrepreneurs learn from your success?

RV: I believe companies are like living organisms, each part of the organization is of equal importance. You need to realize it’s one body with one brain. Lots of big companies tend to become siloed. That is not a good strategy.

Keep in mind each employee is invaluable.

To incentivize your staff, give them an equity stake in the business. More than 25% of our company’s 1,400 employees have equity ownership of the business. This drives collective achievement.

CO—: What management style is most effective?

RV: It’s important for a leader to be flexible with his or her workers; this helps build trust with the workforce. At Mews, 95% of our employees work remotely once they are trained and gain seniority. We want our workers to have freedom, as long as they get their work done. 

CO—: What’s your long-term goal for the company?

RV: The original vision for Mews … is still the journey we are on to … serve as the definitive operating system for hospitality by connecting operations, revenue, guest experience, and payments in one platform, with AI-native workflows built into the core. 

CO— aims to bring you inspiration from leading respected experts. However, before making any business decision, you should consult a professional who can advise you based on your individual situation.

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