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See the pitch deck software startup Stayflexi used to raise $1.6 million helping hotels profit from guests willing to pay for late checkouts
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- Hotel software company Stayflexi announced a $1.6 million seed round on Tuesday.
- The startup aims to make flexible checkout and other services easier and profitable for hotels.
- The funding comes from the accelerator Y Combinator and a few other venture capitalists.
Hotel and vacation rental software company Stayflexi announced on Tuesday that it has raised a $1.6 million seed fund. The funding comes from Y Combinator, the famous startup accelerator that Stayflexi spent time in this year, Agya Ventures, BlueField Capital, Asymmetry Ventures, Good New Ventures, and a range of individuals.
The company, founded in 2018 and based in San Francisco and India, has built software for a hotel operating system that handles guests from the moment they book until the end of their stay. The main distinction it has from other software used by hotels and vacation-rental operators who list homes on platforms like Airbnb is that it promotes flexible check-in and check-out times, as well as flexible booking of amenity space like a business center or conference room for remote workers and other guests.
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The three founders, CTO Preetam Mohan Shetty, CIO Krishna Sasank Talasila, and CEO Venkatesh Sakamuri, worked together at Oracle in San Francisco. They spent a lot of time traveling together, and continually had to deal with rigid check-in and check-out times, even when dozens of rooms in their hotels were empty.
As they searched for a way to solve this, they realized that the demand is there: Sakamuri even found that 80% of the guests at his family’s vacation rental properties asked for flexible check-in and check-out times.
“The supply side is the problem — the system and the processes of running a hotel,” Sakamuri told Insider. “There has to be a fundamental change. That’s how we decided to create an operating system.”
Stayflexi’s software does all of the things you’d imagine it might: keeps track of when guests are staying in which rooms, manages marketing across all of the major travel websites like Expedia, Hotels.com and Airbnb, and automates basic accounting for the property. It also, of course, lets guests pay to come and go whenever is most convenient for their travel schedules.
Stayflexi will be competing against traditional property management, revenue management, and booking channel management like Oracle’s OPERA software, as well as venture-backed startups like Cloudbeds that have built enterprise software suites like Stayflexi’s.
It also offers a range of other ways for hotels to drive revenue. The company offers flexible booking of amenities, allowing hotels to turn empty conference space into impromptu coworking spaces for remote workers, short-term booking of parking, and an easy way to pay to upgrade a room.
The problem of coordinating guests and cleaning has been a major part of why hotels are reticent to be so flexible, but Sakamuri said that Stayflexi automates all of the logistics, saving struggling hotels on labor costs like a round-the-clock receptionist to field guest calls. The company offers self-check-in, lowering the amount of concierge staff a hotel needs, similar to what’s happening in managed short-term rentals like Sonder.
The company sees other opportunities to cut back on hotel labor in the future. One operator asked if they could make a a flexible cleaning schedule, which would allow them to trade staff cleaners for gig workers. Sakamuri said the company hasn’t yet built this feature but expects to build more features that save hotels’ labor costs and incentivize them to switch to the software.
Stayflexi’s founders walked us through the pitch deck they used to raise funds as they left Y Combinator. See below.
Stayflexi’s original goal was to make it easy — and profitable — for hotels to accommodate flexible stays. But to get there, the team had to make a new software platform that centralized most hotel operations.
The founders all come from technical roles at computer infrastructure company Oracle.
Traditionally, hotel check-in and check-out times are quite rigid, especially for mid-market or smaller hotels.
The idea came from the founders’ own experiences dealing with inconvenient check-in and check-out times while rooms sat empty during work trips.
As they built out a system to fix flexibility problems, they realized they could also sell more amenity spaces and services like airport pick-up by adding more flexibility to them.
The company’s software not only runs the operations of a hotels, but enables more revenue streams like flexible timing for guests and amenities.
The pandemic has only accelerated these needs, as hotels become more digital and guests’ needs switch.
The company’s software gives guests flexibility, while giving hoteliers a largely automated software package to run their hotel.
The company calculated that its software could bring an extra $300 in revenue and save 30 minutes of administrative time by accommodating all of this guest’s requests.
Though flexibility was the impetus, Stayflexi operates across the entire booking experience.
The company splits its management engine, which runs most of hotel operations, and its sales engine, which drives additional amenity and other sales.
These two different engines make money in different ways, combining the regular revenue of a software-as-a-service business with more transactional forms of revenue.
The company is already up to 700 properties — 50 more the deck was written — across 6 countries. They are focused on India and the US.
The company integrates with all of the major ways guests book, as well as payment processors like Stripe.
With this round of funding, the company is hoping to grow to over 3,000 properties across the US and India.
The company’s contact page, which also references that some of its data on the hospitality industry comes from Deloitte.