Cloudbeds Raises $9M to Expand its Technology, Brand Awareness

cloudbeds on laptop (Cloudbeds image used with permission)

Cloudbeds, a cloud-based provider of hospitality management software, said today it has raised slightly more than $9 million in Series B financing to expand its software-as-a-service platform and broaden awareness of its brand.

The San Diego company describes the financing as its first institutional round, and said it brings total funding for the five-year-old startup to $20 million. PeakSpan Capital, a growth equity investor based in New York and Burlingame, CA, led the round, which included Nashville Capital, Cultivation Capital, ClearVision Equity, and TTCER Partners.

The company has developed software specifically for independently owned hotels, hostels, inns, campgrounds, and vacation rental properties. “It’s the system that powers their front desk and reservation system, and manages how they market their rooms to travel agents and other third parties,” said Richard Castle, a Cloudbeds co-founder and chief operating officer. “Without a system like ours, it would be very difficult for them to market themselves.”

“We have aimed our focus on what’s important for these smaller, independent hotels, and to keep their user experience intuitive and easy to use,” Castle said Wednesday. The startup provides its software to 17,000 hotels and other properties in more than 120 countries, he added.

Cloudbeds_logo_2017

The company now has 102 employees, Castle said, or about twice as many as it had when Cloudbeds was named as a 2016 San Diego Xconomy Company to Watch. “In the past two-and-a-half years, we’ve really seen a global expansion of Cloudbeds,” Castle said.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.