Richard Valtr built one of the most valuable hospitality technology companies in the world simply because he was a teen who wanted to stop working the night shift.
“I always remember being 14 years old on my summer holidays, thinking that this was so unfair,” the Mews founder told Fortune at his company’s Unfold conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday. “My hatred went for the systems.”
While his friends were enjoying their summers, a teenage Valtr was working the graveyard shift at his family’s boutique hotel in Prague, hunched over credit card slips at 1 a.m., matching every payment to every guest bill as part of the industry’s dreaded “night audit.” The ritual took roughly two hours, and it had to be done every single night.
That dreaded nightly task became the impetus for Valtr to build Mews, a hotel and hospitality management software that’s used by over 15,000 properties worldwide. Valtr said he created Mews, which acts as a catch-all system for hoteliers to handle bookings, check-ins, payments, and operations, simply because he believed there had to be a better way that manually checking slips. “I kind of channeled all my energy towards the actual tasks,” he says, “because I was like, this is so stupid.”
Night receptionist to unicorn
The idea came in 2012, when Valtr first tried to modernize the industry while getting firsthand experience from his family property, the Emblem Hotel, in the center of Prague. It was there that he learned property management systems looked and felt like they’d been designed in the 1990s, and that’s because they had been. When Valtr went shopping for something better, he found nothing. “I just thought, ‘Screw it, how hard can it be to build it myself?'” And along with fellow ex-hotelier CEO Matthijs Welle, who joined Valtr in 2013, the two grew Mews slowly—and then rapidly—across Europe and the U.S.
In January 2026, Mews raised $300 million in a Series D round, bringing the company’s valuation to $2.5 billion and cementing its status as a unicorn and one of the most valuable hospitality technology companies in the world. It was the capstone of a fundraising trajectory that has now totaled $710 million across 14 rounds, including a $75 million raise led by Tiger Global in 2025 and a €101 million round the year prior.
“There’s a reason why we have a following, there’s a reason why we have a community,” Valtr said. “The strength of Mews is its community and the people who feel really passionate about what it is that we’re doing.”
Valtr credits that expansive growth with the sheer fact that Mews is built by people inside the industry. “One of the biggest problems of this industry,” Valtr explained, “is that the people that build the systems, they’re all people that have never worked at that reception desk.”
Legacy system specs tend to be driven from the top, he said, from a head of finance, general manager or franchise owner, the people who want control instead of thinking about the 14-year-old working the nightshift. Valtr said that somebody who’s “relatively highly powered” in a hotel will often demand on certain specifications, “but they’re not built from people who actually do the jobs. They’re people who just want to have control over everything.”
“They might be thinking about how to make more money, but they’re not thinking about it from the perspective of: how do I get these people who are working in my hotel to make me more money?”
Valtr brings up an example of the front desk manager, tasked with checking in guests, ensuring rooms are ready, getting up to speed on a guest’s arrival time and whether they need to secure transportation while they’re in the area. Valtr dismissed most competing systems, saying they’re focused on decreasing record-keeping and logistics instead of helping create more authentic guest experiences and interactions.
“We try and always think about that,” he said, referring to the corporate practice of “dogfooding,” or when a company uses its own product before it releases the service to their clients. “How do we dogfood ourselves, so the thing that we’re preaching, we’re doing the same ourselves as well?”
That framework won Mews the Best PMS (point management system) by Hotel Tech Report for the last three years running, and, as Valtr said, is why “all the systems now look like us.”
The company powers roughly 15,000 hotel customers across 85 countries, processes nearly $20 billion in annual transactions, and has logged over 42 million guest check-ins. Its SaaS gross profit grew 55% in the year leading up to the Series D. And Valtr, who still describes himself as a “frustrated hotelier,” says the mission hasn’t changed since he was 14 and furious at 1 a.m. in Prague.
“We want to make sure that fundamentally all of our hotels feel that they’re the most profitable.”
