Duetto announced the closing of an $80 million Series D financing round led by funds affiliated with Warburg Pincus, a leading global private equity firm focused on growth investing.
The round is the largest ever non-acquisition investment in a software company serving the hotel industry.
Duetto was founded in 2012 by CEO Patrick Bosworth, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Marco Benvenuti and Chief Technology Officer Craig Weissman, the former CTO at Salesforce.com. The company’s flagship software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, GameChanger, brought machine learning, new consumer-centric data and the breakthrough innovation of open pricing to the industry, enabling hotel companies to independently price all distribution channels, customer segments, room types and stay dates in real time.
Duetto, headquartered in San Francisco and with offices in Las Vegas, Cleveland, London and Singapore, has quickly grown to serve more than 2,500 hotels and casinos in more than 60 countries. Those customers have consistently outperformed the market, beating their competition’s rate of revenue growth by more than 6.5 percent since the launch of the company.
“As the pace of change has accelerated and the threats of digital disruption have grown, so have our efforts to help this industry we are so passionate about,” said Bosworth. “We are pleased to have the support of Warburg Pincus, whose extensive experience in building SaaS businesses of scale will help drive our growth and provide solutions to more hoteliers worldwide.
“For more than a decade, hotel companies have been looking for ways to compete more effectively with online travel agencies and drive more direct business. By unifying data across the tech stack, our platform has become the single source capable of delivering true personalization to consumers. Hoteliers now have the ability to increase conversion and drive more direct engagement with consumers by personalizing pricing and merchandising at the point of booking.”
“Duetto has established itself as the market leader in the hotel revenue management space, providing its customers with next-generation solutions to optimize demand, maximize rates and minimize costs,” said Ashutosh Somani, managing director of Warburg Pincus. “With its strong domain experience and deep cloud SaaS technology leadership, Duetto is uniquely positioned to bring new capabilities to the hospitality industry. We look forward to supporting Patrick and the Duetto leadership team in their next chapter of growth.”
Duetto’s Revenue Strategy Platform brings together all core technologies and data to make them accessible through multi-tenant cloud architecture using AWS and MongoDB, enabling future innovations and new applications. The company’s intelligent reporting application ScoreBoard forecasts and analyzes performance, delivering key insights to stakeholders across the organization.
BlockBuster brings open pricing to contracted group business and enhances collaboration between the sales and revenue management teams. PlayMaker, the industry’s first application to personalize the booking experience in real time, customizes merchandising content and offers for known and unknown guests.
“We want to modernize ecommerce in the hotel industry with our Revenue Strategy Platform at the center of the new hotel tech stack,” said Benvenuti. “Our cloud platform is open and agnostic, and we look forward to partnering with other technology companies to unlock new ways of driving efficiencies and more revenue for the hotelier. With our agile development process, we will continually improve our core applications while looking to develop new products when there is a crucial industry need not being served.”
All this technology development means that Duetto is provide a much deeper service to the industry.
“We’re no longer just recommending the best rates,” said Benvenuti, “we’re now taking it a step further: ingesting data from all your systems to make spilt-second analysis and share the right pricing, merchandising and content information at the right times during the booking path. Moving to a modern ecommerce strategy will finally allows casinos to call their own shots and take back control of their business rather than blindly and lazily relying on OTAs.”
Duetto is backed by investors Warburg Pincus, Icon Ventures, Accel Partners, Battery Ventures and Spectrum 28.
