Guesty Raises $50 Million and Buys Your Porter Weeks After Buying MyVR

On 27 April 2021, Guesty, a maker of software that property managers use to run short-term rentals listed on Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo and other sites, announced that it had raised $50 million in Series D funding and had acquired Your Porter, another property management software company. The round took Guesty's total funding to $110 million.

It was the second acquisition Guesty had announced that month. Short Term Rentalz reported on 8 April 2021 that the company had announced the acquisition of MyVR, another property management platform.

Who put in the money

The round was led by the Apax Digital Fund, with participation from the AMI Opportunities Fund. Both were advised by Apax Partners. Five existing investors also took part: Viola Growth, Flashpoint, Vertex Ventures, Kingfisher Investment Advisors and La Maison Partners. Daniel O'Keefe, a managing partner at Apax Digital, was to join Guesty's board of directors.

Guesty said in its release that the round cemented its position as the highest-funded property management software in what it called the alternative accommodation ecosystem. None of the reports cited here gave a valuation for the company or a price for either acquisition. Travolution reported on 14 April that no financial details of the MyVR deal were disclosed.

The company said it would use the money and a growing team for what it called a year of hypergrowth in key markets, for product work aimed at different kinds of customers, and for hiring. It also planned to keep building its marketplace of third-party integrations, including digital concierge services, tools for managing staff remotely and keyless entry, so that customers could offer guests a contact-free stay from inside the Guesty dashboard.

Reports gave different pictures of the company's size and base. CTech reported on 27 April that Guesty employed 250 people, 160 of them in Israel. Built In reported on 28 April that it had 300 employees across 11 offices, and that Amiad Soto, Guesty's co-founder and chief executive, had told it by email that the company planned to bring on 30 new employees in the immediate future. Short Term Rentalz described Guesty as Tel Aviv-based. Built In described it as Los Angeles-based, and the release carried a Los Angeles dateline.

Two acquisitions in one month

MyVR came first. Short Term Rentalz quoted Soto as saying that MyVR, like Guesty, was a Y Combinator alumnus, and the 27 April release said the deal was meant to expand Guesty's footprint in North America. Guesty claimed the purchase made it the largest short-term rental property management platform in the world, Short Term Rentalz and Travolution both reported. Both outlets reported that the Guesty and MyVR platforms would continue to operate independently, with no changes for customers of either company. The MyVR team was to join Guesty, where Short Term Rentalz said it would complement a 90-person in-house product and research and development team.

Your Porter followed on 27 April. Guesty's blog post that day described it as a Dutch company with a mobile-first product for property management companies. Soto told TechCrunch that Your Porter's technology would let Guesty serve the whole range of hosts, from a family-run business with a few units to property management companies of enterprise scale. TechCrunch's headline called Your Porter a competitor.

The lead investor put the two deals in terms of consolidation. Dave Evans, a principal at Apax Digital, said in the release: “Having just acquired MyVR and Your Porter and given the company's differentiated product offering, Guesty is now the logical platform to consolidate the market, working with hosting businesses of all sizes.”

Soto told TechCrunch that more acquisitions were likely. He also pointed to the stock market. Hospitality property management and residential property management each had many publicly traded players, he said, and short-term rentals had none: “you can bet your money that we are eyeing that target.” That was a stated ambition. The release announced no listing.

The booking figures Guesty gave

Guesty presented the round as a sign of recovery, using figures from its own platform. In its blog post of 27 April, it said its United States reservation volume for summer 2021, June through August, was at that point 282% higher than in summer 2020 and 32% higher than in 2019. For the United Kingdom, it said summer 2021 reservation volume was at that point 180% higher than in 2020, and that August was 10% lower than in 2019.

Short Term Rentalz's report of 8 April carried an earlier pair of figures from the company: summer rental reservations in the United States were then outperforming 2019 booking volume by 6% and 2020 booking volume by 110%.

Soto said in the release that short-term rentals had “gone mainstream as a direct result of the pandemic” and now served more guests who wanted the privacy of a home with the amenities of a hotel.

The release also set out what Guesty had changed in its product over the previous year: support for more property types, including multi-unit listings and aparthotels, and for extended stays of one month or longer. Soto told TechCrunch that the company already used machine learning to classify and route 80% of guest messages.

What Guesty sold

Guesty graduated from Y Combinator in 2014, and in April 2021 it said it had customers in over 80 countries. Its platform was built for professional hosts and property management companies, who could use it to manage listings from several online travel agencies, including Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda, Vrbo and TripAdvisor. The release listed among its tools a unified inbox, automation tools, 24/7 guest communication services, accounting and payment processing.

What it meant for hosts

For a manager running a business on MyVR in April 2021, the reported position was that nothing changed: the platform would continue to operate independently, with the same product and services. For a manager on Your Porter, the reports cited here said less. They described what the purchase did for the range of customers Guesty could serve, and they did not say if the Your Porter product would continue to run separately.

For a manager choosing software that month, the news changed the list of vendors. Guesty said it had acquired two property management systems that outlets had described as a rival and a competitor, a principal at its lead investor was talking about consolidation, and its chief executive said more acquisitions were likely. The questions worth putting to any vendor were plain ones: who owned the product, how long it would be supported, and how to get listings, reservations and owner statements out if the answer changed.

The booking figures were a planning signal with a limit. They came from one company's platform and were published with a funding announcement. On Guesty's numbers as they stood on 27 April, reservations on its platform for the United States summer were 32% above 2019, and those for August in the United Kingdom were 10% below it.

Sources

1. Guesty (press release via PR Newswire, UK edition), Property Management Platform Guesty Raises $50M in Series D Funding, Signaling a Year of Recovery for the Short-Term Rental Ecosystem (27 April 2021).
2. Guesty (company blog), Guesty raises $50m in Series D funding & acquires another property management software (27 April 2021).
3. TechCrunch, Property management startup Guesty raises $50M and acquires competitor Your Porter (27 April 2021).
4. CTech (Calcalist), Property management platform Guesty raises $50 million led by Apax as travel returns (27 April 2021).
5. Short Term Rentalz, Guesty raises $50m in Series D funding and buys Your Porter (27 April 2021).
6. Short Term Rentalz, Guesty confirms acquisition of fellow PMS MyVR (8 April 2021).
7. Travolution, Guesty swoops for rival MyVR to create property management software giant (14 April 2021).
8. Built In, Guesty Raises $50M, Acquires Your Porter Ahead of Summer Travel Boom (28 April 2021).