Voyat, a social CRM tool aimed at the hotel industry, came out of stealth today and announced $1.8M in seed funding from Metamorphic Ventures, Eniac Ventures,BoxGroup and several angel investors, including Brett Crosby, who was co-founder of Google Analytics. Metamorpic Ventures is led by David Hirsch, who worked out of Google’s New York office for 8 years. These Google connections should come as little surprise given one of Voyat’s co-founders,Benjamin Habbel, worked for Google from 2010-2012, serving for a time as Marissa Mayer’s chief of staff.
Anyone who spends a lot of time staying in regular hotels will know just how backwards hotel systems really are. From visitor information that extends no further than a glossy advertorial magazine in your room to loyalty systems that do very little to encourage… loyalty. Hotels are another example of an industry with disconnected systems impacting upon its ability to offer real value to customers. It’s no wonder that alternative services (AirBnB for the actual provision of hotel rooms, Expedia for bookings, TripAdvisor for visitor information) are so popular. What the industry needs is a smart platform that ties together hotel-specific and guest-specific functionality. This is the proposition that vendor Voyat is trying to articulate and the company is today both launching its product and announcing a $1.8M funding round. Voyat is looking to offer a suite of different hotel-focused solutions. The first two products from the Voyat platform being launched today are V-CRM and V-Direct. The two solutions aim to provide hotels with guest analytics and business intelligence gathered from a wide network of potential and actual hotel guest information. Voyat has piloted with a number of brands and is entering the space in partnership with Morgans Hotel Group, The New York Palace, and W Hotels.
