€47 million hybrid funding round for travel tech firm Smartness

Smartness has announced that it has closed a €47 million Series B funding round, comprising primary and secondary equity as well as a debt component; this brings the total capital raised by the company since its foundation to over €60 million.

The round is led by United Ventures and CDP Venture Capital, with participation from existing investor Partech, which previously led the Series A round closed at the end of 2023. Other investors who have supported Smartness’s growth in previous rounds include Techshop, the founders of Bending Spoons, Azimut and Rialto.

Starting out as a single-product company, Smartness has rapidly evolved into a multi-product platform, expanding its offering from intelligent pricing management to CRM, payments, property management systems, guest communication and operational AI solutions.

Smartness now operates in over 40 countries, with a particularly strong presence in Italy and the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland). Alongside its geographical expansion, the company continues to record organic growth of around 10% month on month, excluding any contribution from acquisitions. Smartness now has over 5,000 customers.

Since joining the Series A round led by Partech, Smartness has grown more than sixfold, establishing itself as one of Europe’s fastest-growing software companies in the hospitality sector. By 2026, the stated goal is to triple turnover, supporting growth through both organic expansion and strategic acquisitions in Europe. Having already completed several M&A transactions, Smartness intends to further accelerate its market consolidation.

The long-term vision is ambitious: to build the world’s first agentic system for hotels and holiday homes, a new category of technology in which the software does not merely provide tools, but directly carries out operational tasks on behalf of the client, from dynamic pricing to automated guest interaction.

“We see an opportunity to become one of the leading global players in our sector and the leading provider of AI technology for hotels and non-hotel accommodation. A structural shift is underway: from simply providing software to delivering tangible results. We embarked on this journey back in 2020, taking direct responsibility for our clients’ performance. The figures today are proving us right. If we look at the leading global SaaS players in the hospitality sector, we have been among the fastest, if not the fastest, ever to reach – and significantly exceed – €10 million in turnover. “We believe we have what it takes to quickly reach €100 million in revenue and, over time, build a company with over €1 billion in turnover,” says Luca Rodella, CEO and co-founder of Smartness (pictured with the other founders), in a statement.

“Our investment in Smartness stems from the calibre of a founding team that combines first-hand knowledge of the hospitality sector with a clear product vision, and from the company’s ability to develop diverse and complementary solutions, all designed to improve the operational efficiency and experience of industry professionals. In a market that is evolving from pure software to technologies capable of performing tasks on behalf of the customer, Smartness has all the elements to establish itself as a European category leader: a trajectory that fits seamlessly into our investment strategy and which we intend to support in its international expansion,” comments Fabio Pirovano, partner at United Ventures.

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