Founded in 2016, Impala is a London-based company with a mission to power any applications that need to interact with hotels. The company has recently raised $20 million (approx €18 million) from investors to accelerate its rapid expansion.
Helps hotels to break out of outdated software!
This capital will help the company to boost competition and consumer choice in the travel sector as it allows hotels to break out of clunky, outdated software systems.
With the new funding, though, Impala is investing in tools to take bookings, in a move that will revolutionise the potential for cross-selling hotel rooms via specialist travel agencies, niche publishers, search engines and e-commerce sites, among others.
Ben Stephenson, Impala CEO, and co-founder said:
Our technology hopes to become the standard that lets everyone communicate. By democratising access to hotel data, Impala will fundamentally change the way people book hotels and interact with the places they stay. We want to become the rails on which hotel travel runs.
Working with more than 300 hotels!
Lakestar led the Series B round, whose invested into companies Airbnb, GetYourGuide, HomeToGo, Klarna, Spotify, and Revolut, was joined by Latitude Ventures. Impala’s existing backers include Kima Ventures, the fund started by billionaire French telecoms entrepreneur Xavier Niel, and Stride.VC.
The company’s current customers include Phillips and TripAdvisor; it is also working with more than 300 hotels, including Accor, Mercure, and Hyatt-branded properties, and has a backlog of 3,500 hotels awaiting connection to its platform.
Robotic process automation!
This UK company uses a technique known as ‘robotic process automation’ to access data from hotels’ systems quickly and accurately. This means it can capture much more information about individual rooms, for a fraction of the cost, and bring it together in one place in the cloud.
The London-headquartered platform allows travel agencies to search by the kind of detailed parameters guests care about – such as square footage, the presence of a bath, or whether the room has a view. Crucially, Impala’s platform can also be accessed swiftly and easily via an API – a digital ‘plugin’ point between one software system and another.
Right now, it is currently focused on companies that only need to ‘read’ data about rooms, not make bookings – particularly technology firms that provide hotels with ‘smart’ digital infrastructure such as thermostats, keycards, or televisions.
Christoph Schuh, the partner at Lakestar, said:
‘Impala has the potential to become an important layer for the future of travel, a trillion-dollar industry. Impala has assembled an exceptional team with top talent from across the travel industry, and we’re delighted to support them in this next phase of their journey. This investment perfectly fits into our travel tech cluster, where we have made investments like AirBnB, GetYourGuide, HomeToGo, omio, and others.”
Main image credit: Impala
Stay tuned to Silicon Canals for more European technology news