Med Benmansour is from Casablanca and runs a travel-focused startup.
It’s an elegant coincidence—Casablanca, enshrined in the eponymous 1942 movie, is exactly the sort of travel destination that people dream about as they push their coffee around at their office desks. And since 2017, Benmansour has been building Nuitée, a travel tech infrastructure startup that provides the underlying technology that improves the famously fragmented hotel booking experience. Travel didn’t have a Stripe or Twilio, an API solution that smoothed over a high-friction, highly fragmented sector.
"Every time you have a lot of gatekeepers, you have a fragmented space, you can disrupt that space easily," said Benmansour, founder and CEO of Nuitée. "Travel was the only industry that did not have a strong API-first company…It was weird, to be honest with you. Okay, this is a massive industry, and yet they don't have an API-first player."
Bootstrapped from the beginning, Nuitée—which means “overnight stay” in French—grew to 240 employees and its customers include Hilton, Sabre, and Hopper. Now, the company is doubling down: Nuitée has raised a $48 million Series A, led by Accel, Fortune can exclusively report. Nuitée's investors and advisors include Booking.com chairman Robert Mylod Jr., HotelTonight founder Sam Shank, Stripe CBO Jeanne DeWitt, and Shopify CRO Bobby Morrison. It’s a massive triumph for a company operating in an industry thrown into chaos by the pandemic.
"COVID was not a bad time for us," said Benmansour, who earlier in his career worked as a Silicon Valley chip designer for Kawasaki Microelectronics. "It was actually the best time for us to show how resilient the team was. We were small, we had no debt, so we kind of bootstrapped the business. So, our balance sheet was very strong."
Super.com, a VC-backed consumer fintech platform, has been a customer for four years, and Nuitée helps solve a core problem for them—providing "reliable hotel inventory at the best price," said Hussein Fazal, Super.com cofounder and CEO. Fazal says Nuitée was a stable partner in the depths of the pandemic.
"Nuitée made a huge difference [during the pandemic]," said Fazal. "Even then, it felt to me from the outside, like a very stable, long-term thinking company."
Travel isn’t exactly an industry that’s attracted VC backing, because there are lots of barriers to venture-scale returns. It’s a cyclical industry, for one, where one great quarter doesn’t promise another.
"So, you have this cyclical nature, and then lots of times you don’t build a ton of equity value because it's very transaction-focused," said Ben Fletcher, Accel partner. "If you want to compete against Expedia or Booking.com, you then have to spend a ton on customer acquisition. That’s really hard."
But Fletcher—who first met Benmansour at a travel conference in Berlin, where their first meeting stretched into five hours—thinks Nuitée is uniquely equipped to beat the odds. Nuitée is in growth mode, says Benmansour.
"The way we see this happening is like a movie of three acts," he said. "Act One is basically, let's say, from zero to $1 billion. That's where we are today."
As Fletcher eyeballs it, there’s a lot of value even in that first act.
"If they can get Act One, they just replace aggregators and [hotel room wholesalers] bed banks," Fletcher told Fortune. "There are aggregators and bed banks today that are worth between $2 billion and $5 billion. So, if they can continue to get a portion of that, this is going to be a $1 billion to $3 billion-valuable company."
Then, it’s on to Act Two.
"Act Two, let's say from $1 billion to $10 billion, that’s when we start pissing people off," said Benmansour. "We start taking some market share…That’s one of the reasons we raised, to make sure if we run into challenges, we have the right backing and network to help us scale."
Then, there’s Act Three, the "market-making" phase, where Nuitée aims to enable a wide range of businesses and applications to monetize their audiences through travel services. Benmansour likens this to what companies like Stripe and Twilio have done—building the infrastructure to enable a whole ecosystem of developers and businesses.
There’s a long road ahead, of course. But this three-act structure strikingly isn’t just a plan—it’s a road map that ends with Nuitée as a destination in its own right.
ICYMI…I caught up with Databricks CEO and cofounder Ali Ghodsi about the company’s $10 billion mega-round, and my colleague Leo Schwartz had the exclusive on crypto startup BVNK’s $50 million raise.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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