Japan hotel-booking start-up raises $6.3m
Metro Engines, a Tokyo-based start-up that provides pricing tools for online hotel booking sites, has raised JPY700 million ($6.3 million) from a group of Japanese venture capital and strategic investors.
Participants in the funding round included SBI Investment, NEC Capital Solutions, Venture Labo Investments, and JR East Startup, as well as IT services provider and online travel agency Evolable Asia. The company will use the new capital to build its team of engineers and data scientists and invest in technology development.
Metro Engines was founded in 2016 and raised a seed round of undisclosed size the same year from Beenos. The company’s products allow hotel booking sites to change their pricing and room offerings dynamically based on real-time data, and use machine learning to improve their understanding of customer behavior over time.
“In Europe and the United States, dynamic pricing that adjusts the price of goods and services flexibly and maximizes corporate profits has been introduced in all industries,” said SBI in a statement. “We expect that the technology and data Metro Engine possesses can likely be applied to other fields, and we will further expand this potential and help them to realize their vision.”
Metro Engines’ chief competitor is Sora, which operates artificial intelligence-powered hotel pricing platforms MagicPrice and Hotel Banzuke. So far Sora’s largest funding round since its founding in 2015 is a JPY80 million investment last year from 500 Startups Japan, Daiwa Corporate Investment, and several angel investors.
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