Tag: Hospitality

Lighthouse, an analytics provider for the hospitality sector, lights up with $370M at a $1B valuation

Posted on by faz_business


We have yet another sign of the boom in the travel industry: a major fundraise by one of the B2B startups serving the space. Lighthouse, a data analytics platform for hotels and others in the hospitality industry, has closed a Series C round of $370 million. The KKR-led round catapults Lighthouse to a valuation of over $1 billion. 

Lighthouse said it will use the funding to continue building more data sets, analytics tools and AI functionality. It may also be using this large capital injection for acquisitions to expand its business: The company has made four acquisitions to date. One of those, Stardekk, happened earlier this year, bringing Lighthouse an all-in-one hotel software for managing reservations and more.

At $370 million, the round is one of the biggest for a startup headquartered in London, as well as one of the biggest rounds for the travel sector this year.

For those tracking how Europe’s startup ecosystem is performing at the moment, Lighthouse’s fundraising track record is instructive: The company raised $80 million in 2021, when fundraising for startups was at its peak. This new round could be seen as an affirmation from investors that the startup’s been checking the right boxes in the last few years. 

Startups in Europe have been grappling with slower activity in a number of tech subsectors, geopolitical turmoil, and sluggish economic growth. Lighthouse caters to the global travel market, currently estimated to be worth some $15 trillion annually, and its focus on providing business intelligence while applying newer technology like AI underscores how data-driven companies 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, it provides business intelligence, specifically analytics and insights. Lighthouse says it crunches 400 terabytes of travel and market data daily, and “leverages AI” to provide insights to customers. Its products target large hotel chains and others focusing on smaller operations.

The startup says its tools are used by more than 70,000 hospitality providers, which include big names like Holiday Inn, Radisson and NH Hotel Group. 

The round is a testament to the hotel sector’s demand for better tooling to improve their pricing and overall offering to customers — particularly important at a time travelers have more choices 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.” TechCrunch is hopefully speaking with Fitzpatrick later today to hear more. 

The company’s previous round saw participation from Spectrum Equity, F-Prime Capital, Eight Roads Ventures, and Highgate Technology Ventures, and all of these investors are also investing in this latest Series C.

Ozempic and Wegovy Might Be Supercharging Your Taste Buds

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Semaglutide, the active ingredient in popular diabetes and obesity drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, can also tweak people’s taste buds for the better, preliminary research suggests. Scientists found that women taking semaglutide improved their taste sensitivity, particularly to sweetness. The findings may illuminate another reason why it and similar drugs can so effectively help people lose weight, the authors say.

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The research was led by scientists from the University Medical Center in Ljubljana, Slovenia. They were intrigued by animal studies that appeared to show GLP-1, a hormone key to the body’s control of blood sugar and hunger, also plays an important role in influencing the perception of sweetness. In mice bred to no longer produce GLP-1, for instance, their sensitivity to sweetness seems dramatically reduced.

Semaglutide and other incretins are designed to mimic GLP-1, and some research has found that people on the drug tend to experience a decline in desire for sweet, savory and salty foods. The mechanisms behind this shift aren’t entirely clear, however, so the researchers wanted to see if a similar change in taste sensitivity can happen in humans as well as mice taking semaglutide.

It may sound unintuitive, but increasing taste sensitivity could actually help with weight loss by reducing the desire for excessively sweet, high-calorie foods. By perceiving sweetness more intensely, individuals might feel satisfied with smaller amounts of sugar, leading to a decrease in overall calorie intake.

The team conducted a 16-week-long trial with 30 women volunteers, with half receiving the drug and the other half a placebo. The volunteers had their taste sensitivity measured using strips containing all four basic tastes (sweet, salty, sour, and bitter) placed on their tongue. Additionally, some of their tongue cells were collected to examine gene expression, and they underwent an MRI scan before and after tasting something sweet following a standard meal.

“The present study demonstrated that semaglutide improved taste sensitivity in women with obesity, meaning that the detection threshold for different concentrations of four basic tastes were improved,” lead study author Mojca Jensterle Sever told Gizmodo.

The team also found that the tongue cells of those taking semaglutide experienced changes in the expression of genes linked to the perception of sweetness and the renewal of taste buds. And via the MRI scans, they found changes in how users’ brains responded to sweetness, particularly in the angular gyrus of the parietal cortex. The angular gyrus is thought to help integrate our different senses to better understand the world around us and solve problems, while the parietal cortex is known to have cells that carry GLP-1 receptors.

The team’s findings are being presented this weekend at ENDO 2024, so they haven’t yet undergone the typical peer-review process. Sever notes their research is only a proof-of-concept study, intended to show that there’s something more to explore, not to definitively confirm a phenomenon. Since taste perception can vary significantly between different people, it’s also possible that GLP-1 drugs would not affect everyone’s taste buds the same way.

But research has suggested that at least some people with obesity perceive sweetness less intensely than usual, which might then help drive their craving for even sweeter, often more calorie-filled foods. GLP-1 drugs are thought to help treat obesity in several ways, such as by prompting the sense of fullness earlier into a meal than before. And it’s certainly possible that enhancing people’s sensitivity to sweetness might be another, the authors say.

“Our study provides ‘food for thought’ on the additional mechanisms by which semaglutide and other incretin-based therapies facilitate changes in food preference and eating behavior that might potentially lead to reductions in body weight beyond appetite suppression and improved control of eating,” Sever said.

Future studies, hopefully addressing the limitations of this current research, “will clarify whether the efficacy of semaglutide in treating obesity is also a matter of taste,” she added.