Richard Valtr built one of the most valuable hospitality technology companies in the world simply because, as a teenager, he wanted to stop working the graveyard shift.
“I always remember being 14 years old, on summer vacation, thinking how unfair it was,” the Mews founder told Fortune at his company’s Unfold conference in Amsterdam (Netherlands). “My hatred was directed at the systems.”
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While his friends enjoyed the summer, young Valtr spent the early hours working at his family’s boutique hotel in Prague, hunched over credit card receipts at 1 a.m., reconciling each payment with each guest account as part of the hotel industry’s dreaded “night audit.” The ritual took about two hours and had to be done every night.
This exhausting task became the impetus for Valtr to create Mews, hotel and hospitality management software used today by more than 15,000 properties around the world.
Valtr said he created Mews, which serves as an integrated system for hoteliers to manage reservations, check-ins, payments and operations, simply because he believed there needed to be a better way than checking receipts manually. “I channeled all my energy into the tasks themselves,” he said, “because I thought: This is so stupid.”
From night receptionist to unicorn
The idea came about in 2012, when Valtr first tried to modernize the industry while gaining practical experience at his family’s Emblem Hotel in the center of Prague.
It was there that he realized that hotel management systems seemed to have been designed in the 1990s — and that’s because they really had been.
When he went looking for something better, he found nothing.
“I thought, screw it, how hard could it be to build this yourself?” So, together with Matthijs Welle, a former hotelier who joined the company in 2013, the two expanded Mews slowly — and then quickly — across Europe and the United States.
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In January 2026, Mews raised $300 million, bringing the company’s value to $2.5 billion and cementing its status as a unicorn and one of the most valuable hospitality technology companies in the world.
It was the culmination of a fundraising trajectory that already totals US$710 million in 14 rounds, including a contribution of US$75 million led by Tiger Global in 2025 and another round of €101 million in the previous year.
“There’s a reason we have followers, there’s a reason we have a community,” Valtr said. “The strength of Mews is its community and the people who are truly passionate about what we are doing.”
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Valtr attributes this accelerated growth to the fact that Mews was built by people who came from the industry itself. “One of the biggest problems in this industry,” he explained, “is that the people who build the systems have never worked at that front desk.”
According to him, the specifications of old systems tend to be defined from the top down — by the financial director, general manager or franchise owner — by people who want control rather than thinking about the 14-year-old working the early morning shift.
Valtr said that someone “relatively powerful” within a hotel often insists on certain specifications, “but they’re not created by the people who actually do the work. They’re people who just want to control everything.”
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“They might be thinking about how to make more money, but not from the perspective of: How do I get the people who work at my hotel to make me more money?”
Valtr cites as an example the reception manager, responsible for checking in, ensuring that rooms are ready, monitoring guests’ arrival times and checking whether they need transportation during their stay.
He dismissed most competing systems, saying they are focused on reducing bureaucracy and logistics rather than helping create more authentic guest experiences and interactions.
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“We always try to think about this,” he said, referring to the corporate practice known as “dogfooding,” when a company uses its own product before releasing it to customers. “How can we use our own product, so that what we preach can also be applied by ourselves?”
This approach has seen Mews win Hotel Tech Report’s Best PMS (property management system) award for the past three years in a row and, according to Valtr, explains why “every system now looks like ours.”
The company serves approximately 15,000 hotels in 85 countries, processes almost US$20 billion in annual transactions and has recorded more than 42 million guest check-ins. SaaS gross profit grew 55% in the year prior to funding.
And Valtr, who still describes himself as a “frustrated hotelier,” says the mission hasn’t changed since when he was 14 and furious at 1 a.m. in Prague.
“We want to ensure that at the end of the day, all of our hotels feel like they are the most profitable.”
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