HotelTonight acquires PrimaTable for technology and team

HotelTonight acquired fellow San Francisco startup PrimaTable, which specializes in revenue management for restaurants -- but don't expect HotelTonight to deliver restaurant reservations or room service any time soon.

Sam Shank, HotelTonight co-founder and CEO, says PrimaTable's yield-management software will be folded into HotelTonight's existing platform to improve its effectiveness for participating hotels. This is HotelTonight's first acquisition.

PrimaTable focuses on helping restaurants optimize their revenue and manage resources, and HotelTonight plans to use the company's expertise in the hotel sphere.

Consumers booking tonight-only deals through HotelTonight's mobile apps likely won't notice any changes from the acquisition as it is all about the way hotels manage their rates and inventory behind the scenes.

"To get simplicity on the front end, you need a lot of complexity and logic on the back end," Shank says.

HotelTonight, which specializes in curated tonight-only hotel deals in about 60 cities, has raised about $35 million in funding, which was designed to foot the bill for expansion and opportunistic acquisitions.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Shank says the price tag was "non-trivial."

With the acquisition, PrimaTable's three employees join HotelTonight.

Jamie Davidson, PrimaTable co-founder and CEO, becomes HotelTonight's vice president of product, and co-founder Colin Zima takes on the role of HotelTonight's chief data scientist.

Davidson previously worked at Google on optimizing the display algorithm, and Zima focused on search ranking algorithms.