Mogul Recruiter's $20 Million Funding Draws Notice to a New Wave of Data-Based Travel Startups

Mogul Recruiter, a travel tech startup in Los Angeles, said last week it has raised $20 million, led by its largest seed investor, Silicon Valley-based L37, to help partnerships despite the coronavirus pandemic. Mogul analyzes records to identify star performers in the hospitality sector and helps hoteliers hire these stars and customers book stay at hotels with these workers. The announcement may draw little attention amid the distractions of a week with Airbnb's filing to go public. But the sector should take notice. While the sums involved are small and the odds against startups are high, Mogul's real significance is a tiny-but-eye-catching sign of a feverish race underway by startups to use big data and next-generation analytics in travel. The Airbnb initial public offering might represent the last big hurrah of a two-decade rise of travel companies that moved offline travel purchases online. The "big bang" of these online travel companies began with the birth of Expedia and its peers in the late 1990s. The next wave of travel startups instead focuses on linking data with analytical tools to predict what customers will want next and how businesses can operate more efficiently. Startups like Mogul Recruiter are applying computational techniques pioneered at companies like Amazon, Ant Financial, and Barclay's and using them to fine-tune travel businesses tha