Australia's SiteMinder secures $73m pre-IPO round

Ellerston Capital, Fidelity International, Pendal Group, and Washington H. Soul Pattinson also took part in the round, which comprised a mix of primary and secondary capital. Early investors Bailador Technology Investments, Technology Crossover Ventures, and Les Szekely, an investment director at local GP Equity Venture Partners, will retain positions in the company.

Founded in 2006, SiteMinder positions itself as the leading guest acquisition platform for hoteliers globally and the main technology partner for Airbnb and Trip.com. It has processed more than 100 million bookings for more than 35,000 hotels. This activity equates to some $35 billion in transactions.

The company claims its revenue and business performance have been resilient amid the disruption to the travel industry caused by the pandemic and that this resilience reflects the importance of its technology to its hotel operator clients.

In the 2021 financial year, SiteMinder sustained revenue of more than A$100 million, achieved a 40% increase in the number of customers using its payments and other transaction-based products, and experienced revenue decline of less than 6% in constant currency terms. Its valuation held steady at just over A$1 billion based on the new funding round.

Operational traction during this period includes an expansion of the company’s metasearch and hotel payments programs, trialing of a new digital acquisition strategy for small hotel operators, and the launch of a multi-property management product designed to simplify the complexity involved with distribution for hotel chains. Last year, it launched a publicly available data sourcing tool for the industry.

BlackRock, AustralianSuper, Pendal and Ellerston provided a A$100 million investment early last year to drive further international expansion. Siteminder is currently running out of eight offices, including Australia, Thailand, and India. The company serves hotels in 150 countries, and its platform is operable in 11 languages.

“After joining SiteMinder’s capital raise of over A$100 million in January 2020, at a time where we could not have foreseen the events ahead, what we have seen is SiteMinder show tremendous agility, resilience and innovation, particularly as the needs of their customers and partners have rapidly shifted,” George Batsakis, a senior portfolio manager at AustralianSuper, said in a statement.

“The unprecedented impacts of the last 18 months have proven the importance of easy-to-use technology platforms for hotels, and we are pleased to be growing our support of SiteMinder as the company continues to provide these much-needed services to support its customers.”

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Support services
• Technology
• Expansion
• Consumer
• Australia
• BlackRock
• AustralianSuper
• Fidelity
• enterprise software