Selfbook hotels payments
Hotel payment software provider Selfbook has completed a $15 million extension of its Series A financing that values the company at $300 million.
Tiger Global Management led the extension, as well as the company’s $25 million Series A in October. At that time, New York-based Selfbook was valued at $125 million — so it has essentially seen a 2.4x increase in valuation from the fourth quarter of 2021 to the first quarter of 2022 and a 38x increase after it raised a $2 million seed round in April of 2021.
New strategic investor JAWS Estates Capital — hotelier Barry Sternlicht’s family office — also put money in the extension. Sternlicht is co-founder and chairman of Starwood Capital Group.
Founded in September 2020 as a pivot from a consumer travel app to a B2B company, New York-based Selfbook describes itself as the “Shopify for travel,” and says it operates at the intersection of hospitality and fintech. Hotels can implement its technology, according to Meniri, “with a single line of code” to improve their booking experience directly on their existing reservation systems.
Selfbook says that its software gives hotels a way to accept “one-click” payments directly on their websites while eliminating fraud and reducing chargebacks. The company claims that its software is the only payment technology for hotels that supports digital wallet use, including Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and buy now, pay later. It also supports traditional debit and credit card payments.
While he declined to reveal hard revenue figures, Meniri said the company’s customer base had been growing about 100% month over month. He said we could infer that revenue growth is directly correlated to user base growth, but that it might fluctuate depending on the value of the contract. Headcount has grown from five last April to 70 today.
Currently, Selfbook has 30 customers live on its platform and nearly 100 hotels onboarded, according to Meniri. The company makes money by charging a fixed 1% fee for all transactions it helps facilitate. It’s possible that Selfbook will increase that to 2% in the future.
This year, the company is planning to launch an extension product called PayBox that will allow it to install payment on existing checkout flows.
Selfbook hotels payments
