Here is yet one more sign of the travel industry’s noticeable boom: a major growth round for one of the B2B startups servicing it. Lighthouse, a data analytics platform for hotels and others in the hospitality industry, has closed a Series C of $370 million. The KKR-led round catapults Lighthouse to a valuation of over $1 billion.
The funding will be used to continue building out more data sets, analytics tools and AI functionality, the company said. It may also be using this large capital injection for acquisitions to evolve its business: the company has made four acquisitions to date, and one from earlier this year — Stardekk — has built all-in-one hotel software for managing reservations and more.
The company is based out of London, and this is one of the biggest rounds for a startup based in the city, as well as one of the biggest rounds for the travel sector, for this year.
For those tracking how Europe’s startup ecosystem is performing at the moment, Lighthouse’s funding track record is instructive: the company raised $80 million in 2021, at a peak moment for fundraising.
This latest round is an affirmation from investors that it’s been doing the right things in the last several years.
In Europe, startups have been beaten by slower activity across a number of segments of tech, geopolitical turmoil and slow economic growth. Lighthouse has aimed its business at a global market (currently estimated to be worth some $15 trillion annually), and its focus on business intelligence and applying newer technology like AI to providing it, underscores how data-driven businesses continue to see opportunities.
The company’s core set of tools are not directly related to taking bookings or managing staff and accounts per se. Instead, its focus is on business intelligence, specifically analytics and insights. It says that it crunches 400 terabytes of travel and market data daily, and “leverages AI” to provide insights to customers, with products targeting large hotel chains, and others targeting smaller operations.
It says it has more than 70,000 hospitality providers using its tools, with some of the big names including Holiday Inn, Radisson and NH Hotel Group.
The round is a testament to the demand among hotels for better tooling to improve its pricing and overall offer to customers, at a time when we have more choice than ever before, and more ways of finding and booking hotels.
“We’re just getting started in making hospitality data and tools more powerful, accessible, and affordable,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of Lighthouse, in a statement. “I couldn’t be more energized by what we’re working towards.” We’re hopefully speaking with him later today to hear more.
The company’s previous round included Spectrum Equity, F-Prime Capital, Eight Roads Ventures, and Highgate Technology Ventures, and all of these investors are also participating in this latest Series C.
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Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to acquire Datavolo, a data pipeline management company, for an undisclosed sum.
Snowflake unveiled the deal at the close of the market bell on Wednesday, when it also announced its Q3 2025 earnings. The purchase hasn’t yet closed, and it’s subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted in a release.
Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt was previously CVP at Cloudera, while Roquet was Cloudera’s CMO and, before that, a business development executive at AWS.
Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an open source project for data processing developed by the NSA, to power a platform for automating data flows between various enterprise data sources. Data “processors” extract, clean, transform, and enrich data, including for generative AI use cases.
With Datavolo, which managed to raise $21 million in venture capital from investors including Citi Ventures and General Catalyst prior to the acquisition, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy envisions creating more versatile data processing pipelines for Snowflake customers. For example, he says, Datavolo might enable users to replace single-use data connectors with flexible pipelines that let them move data from cloud and on-premise sources to Snowflake’s data cloud.
“By bringing Datavolo into the Snowflake fold, we are expanding how much of the data lifecycle Snowflake captures — unlocking both simplicity and cost savings for our customers, without any sacrifice to data extensibility,” Ramaswamy said in a statement. “We are excited to have the Datavolo team join Snowflake as we accelerate what is the best platform for enterprise data — unstructured and structured, batch and streaming — and dedicated to the success of the open source community.”
Witt says that Snowflake will support and help to manage the Apache NiFi project following the close of the acquisition. “Data engineering at scale can be incredibly costly and complex, and our aim has always been to simplify experiences for our customers so they can achieve value faster,” he added in a press release. “By joining forces with Snowflake, we can empower our customers with the immense scale and radical simplicity of Snowflake’s platform, ultimately unlocking data engineering for more users.”
Thanks in part to AI, the demand for data management technologies has surged. Fortune Business Insights estimates that the market for global enterprise data management could be worth $224.87 billion by 2032.
Data management was a challenge for enterprises long before the AI boom, though. According to a 2022 survey from Great Expectations, a platform for data quality, 91% of organizations said that data quality issues were impacting their performance.
Against that backdrop, it’s not surprising to see firms like Datavolo rise to prominence.
Today was a newsy day for Snowflake, which reported better-than-expected earnings that sent its stock climbing 19%. In addition to buying Snowflake, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to integrate the AI startup’s models in its Snowflake Cortex AI, Snowflake Intelligence, and Cortex Analyst products.
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