Skift Take
Life House is a hospitality company that strives to be an experience platform offering more than mere beds to sleep in, echoing some of the Megatrends Skift identified for 2018. But it's unclear why investors in the company think it will scale as rapidly as venture capitalists typically expect.
Travel Startup Funding This Week
Each week we round up travel startups that have recently received or announced funding. Please email Travel Tech Reporter Justin Dawes at [email protected] if you have funding news.
The total publicized this week was $10 million in venture capital funding and $30 million in private equity and debt capital.
>>Life House, a hospitality management company, has raised $40 million in funding despite having only been founded last year.
The unusual funding included a $10 million venture capital component across two rounds. Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital led the Series A in February, and Comcast Ventures led the seed round. Trinity Ventures also participated.
The funding also included $30 million in other capital. Henley, a private equity real estate investor, led that private equity and debt capital funding.
The concept behind New York City-based Life House isn’t new. There are hundreds of hotel development and management companies worldwide. What is novel is for Silicon Valley venture capital to back one.
Investors justify their support because, a company spokesperson said, Life House’s “scalable asset-light business model and its in-house software and pricing analytics” make its product and marketing distinctive and eventually sellable to other hotels. For example, Life Hotel aims to offer to match guests in its shared rooms based on guest profiles and preferences.
The company said it is operating two mid-scale hotels in Miami (though it declined to name them). It is planning to reopen them under the Life House brand in the autumn after renovations. It plans to open new properties under the brand, including an upscale hotel in Brooklyn slated to open in early 2019.
Rami Zeidan, who has worked at Starwood, Sydell, and TPG, and Yury Yakubchyk, a technology expert and serial entrepreneur, co-founded the company.
Earlier this week in Skift startup coverage: “Vacation Rental Search Site Tripping Lays Off 15 Employees and Restructures.”
Check out our previous startup funding roundups, here.
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Tags: funding, startups, vcroundup
Photo credit: Miami, Florida, is where Life House will open its first properties under its new lifestyle hospitality brand aimed at helping people with a millennial-mindset meet, travel, and work together. Bloomberg