Duetto Raises $21M to Bring Smarter Hotel Revenue Software to Big Brands

Duetto, which uses big data to help hoteliers understand customer demand and optimize pricing strategies, today announced a $21 million fundraising round led by Accel Partners.

The round brings Duetto’s fundraising to a total of $32.2 million. Previous investors including Battery Ventures, Altimeter Capital, and Lee Pillsbury also participated in this most recent round.

The fundraising will not be focused on new products — Duetto currently offers three products for full-service hotels, limited-service hotels, and casinos — bur rather on scaling out the sales and marketing teams needed to attract larger clients.

“Now we can stay ahead of hiring as we sign larger hotel groups. We need to give them the support they need and the confidence that we’re ready to give it,” explains Duetto co-founder Patrick Bosworth.

Looking ahead on the product side, Bosworth briefly describes a plan to expand outside of room revenue management into other parts of the hotel.

“Our general philosophy is to be diving deep into all revenue opportunities inside a hotel,” explains Bosworth. “The key is to be selling at a price people want to pay and to be available to them when they’re ready to make a purchase, figure out what that ideal mix is in order to serve customers best.”

Duetto has signed hundreds of small to medium-sized properties across more than a dozen countries since 2012, but is currently eyeing deals with larger brands that would expedite the company’s growth and geographic reach.

The company claims customers are seeing 10 to 20 percent revenue increases

“We’re giving these general managers more levers to turn,” explains Brian O’Malley at Accel Partners.

What does that mean for customers?

O’Malley explains it like this: If a hotel has a special AAA rate and a customer wants to stay 5 days, two of which overlap the hotel’s most profitable night, then the hotel doesn’t offer it to the guest at all. With Duetto, the hotel can offer that guest a special rate with the exception of two nights.

Accel has previously invested in Kayak and HotelTonight, but Duetto’s founding team had a mix of consumer and software expertise that made them want to invest in a B2B product.

“As a firm that invests across a variety of sectors, we play to trends on both the consumer side and the software side. Specifically in hospitality, there’s a lot of innovation going on on both sides of the fence. In this case, you had a team that combined both very detailed experience on the software side and they understood whats going on on the consumer side as well,” explains O’Malley.

“We’re keen to do more in hospitality sector.”