Glasgow / Munich / Zell am See (Austria), 09 February 2011. Scottish Equity Partners (SEP) along with Target Partners completed a multi-million Euro investment in Hetras GmbH, a developer of hotel management software based in Zell am See, Austria. Hetras will use the funds to further enhance and internationally roll out its SaaS product. Target Partners had already made a significant investment in Hetras in 2009.
Some hotel chains still use reservation technology from the 1960s The hotel industry has been historically slow to adapt to new technologies. As a result, most hotels today have a collection of poorly integrated applications from multiple vendors: many running on MS-DOS, others on complex client-server clusters and some even running on mainframes.
Hetras is positioned as the first pure Software as a Service (SaaS) player for the international hotel industry. Hetras also consolidates multiple functional areas into a single application. With Hetras, all reservations and guest profiles are managed in a single place instead of scattered among central reservation systems, property management systems, channel managers, hotel websites and guest loyalty databases.
CitizenM, widely regarded as today’s most innovative hotel chain, has been working with Hetras for half a year. The highly automated “budget luxury” chain requires all guests to book online and check in and check out at kiosks in the lobby. Hetras powers these processes – virtually without human intervention. Hetras also has fixed commitments from an additional 55 properties from various chains in seven different countries.
Gracey, Principal at SEP and primary driver of this transaction, explains the motivation behind the transaction: “Hetras is a first class team who have achieved a great deal with their product. They operate in a large, established market dominated by products that cannot address the demands of the modern hotels to sell rooms and communicate directly with their customers on the internet. Hetras’ product addresses these requirements with their innovative, pay-as-you-go product. To use Hetras, all the hotel owner needs is a web browser and an internet connection. We believe that is unique to the market.” Gracey represents SEP on the hetras board.
Hetras management includes founder Michael Heinze, creator of Europe’s first hotel channel manager; Keith Gruen, co-founder of Fidelio Software, current market leader in hotel software; and Uli Pillau, Managing Director EAME at IDeaS, market leader in hotel revenue management. “Getting SEP together with Target Partners on board enables us to take a quantum leap forward in our drive towards market and technological leadership” says Gruen, a former venture capitalist himself.
With Euro 225 million under management, Target Partners is one of the leading early-stage venture capital funds in Germany. The firm invests in start-up and early stage companies and supports them during their build-out and expansion phases. With many years of experience as managers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, the team at Target Partners supports entrepreneurs in developing and marketing products and services, building organizations, raising money and taking companies public in Europe and the United States. For more details see www.targetpartners.de
Press Contact: Prof. Dr. Perry Reisewitz, perry.reisewitz@compass-communications.de, +49 (0) 89 189 508-80
hetras is the first company to build a fully internet-based application for hotels and hotel chains of all sizes. The hetras hotel management software combines traditional property management systems (PMS), central reservation systems (CRS), customer relationship management (CRM), channel management and internet booking engines into a unified application. The hetras product is offered on a SaaS basis, meaning the customers pay a flat fee per month per room. The 100% service oriented architecture (SOA) not only enables unprecedented scalability and security but allows third parties to extend the hetras application with additional functionality and custom front-ends. To find out more about hetras or join the hetras mailing list, visit www.hetras.com. Press Contact: Keith Gruen, keith.gruen@hetras.com +49 172 8976199