We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Lighthouse (formerly OTA Insight), the leading provider of cloud-based business intelligence for the global hospitality industry.

When we first met CEO Sean Fitzpatrick and the founders of Lighthouse more than four years ago, it was clear that they shared our core belief that data and software can transform the way businesses and industries operate.

At the time, just a few thousand hotels were utilizing the company’s flagship Rate Insight product to support competitive pricing analysis and rate setting. But what struck us the most was that the company’s high-quality, easy-to-use data platform was winning the trust of savvy operators at the forefront of an industry that was looking for real-time insights and context to support a broader set of commercial decisions.

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic upended the travel and hospitality industry’s longstanding assumption that past booking patterns were the primary predictor of future demand, the team at OTA Insight saw that forces including the proliferation of online distribution channels and last-minute mobile bookings and cancellations were putting pressure on the industry to make faster, more dynamic decisions, which would in turn require more dynamic intelligence.

With a belief in that vision, we stayed close with Sean and his team over the last several years, during which they made rapid progress and expertly navigated an unprecedented time for the industry.

Specifically, they continued to enhance their core Rate Insight product and release innovative, industry-first solutions such as Market Insight and Revenue Insight. In doing so, the business laid the cornerstones of a significantly broader commercial platform that makes it easy for anyone responsible for revenue-driving decisions within a hotel to apply real-time intelligence that is granular and configurable, relevant, forward-looking, and inclusive of both internal performance indicators and external market and competitive signals.

We reached out to Lighthouse customers and heard time and again how quickly and consistently they found actionable data in the company’s applications, and we saw the way customers retained and relied on the product even during the most challenging pandemic-induced periods of budget cuts and hotel vacancies.

Lastly, we saw the company scale its distinctive and highly effective go-to-market capabilities, which are largely centered around the products’ ability to display data and immediately highlight actionable strategies for day-to-day decision makers at the property and regional levels. Now serving more than 55,000 properties around the world, including global chains, independent hotels, and alternative aparthotel properties alike, Lighthouse has become a highly respected and deeply trusted source of information for many of the most important decisions hospitality businesses make every day.

We’ve also been impressed by Lighthouse’s consistent penetration of the global hotel market, and we think the business is just getting started.

Like many of the other vertical data businesses we have partnered with, including Definitive Healthcare, Datassential, and iTA Software, another leading provider of travel industry intelligence acquired by Google, Lighthouse has the opportunity to build an enduring, category-leading data business that helps customers all around the world make smarter decisions and achieve better outcomes.

We are extremely excited to partner with Sean and the team and join the company’s board for this next phase of growth. We’ll be helping the company scale its go-to-market teams, accelerate its product roadmap, and aggregate new data sets that can provide additional value to customers. As the world continues to reopen and recover from the global pandemic, we look forward to helping Lighthouse continue elevating the industry’s ability to navigate the dynamic environment that lies ahead.