Chinese hotel tech company Shiji Group has increased its stake in SnapShot - effectively buying out the shares of the founders of the five-year-old company.
David Turnbull and Michael Heinze are both leaving the Germany-based business as a result.
Shiji made an original investment of €1 million in SnapShot in late-2013, then later pumped in a further €25 million investment round in July 2015, including a significant but undisclosed stake in the business.
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Financial details of the takeover have not been disclosed.
Shiji says the investment has come about following positive results for the company since the original support and "recognizing its future potential".
SnapShot recently installed Carson Booth, a former-Starwood executive, as its new CEO.
Startup to mainstream
The company has a team of around 90 people, with offices in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic and Hong Kong.
In a post on Medium, Turnbull concedes the challenges of running a startup "prevented us from realising everything we set-out to do six years ago and the impact that such a large investment has at such an early stage, meant that for all levels of the organisation, focus on core objectives was an early challenge."
He adds: "The journey was inevitably a learning curve, using mistakes made to inspire improvements. The target we set ourselves (bringing thousands of hotels, PMS partners and developers to a neutrally managed data platform and digital marketplace) required a seismic shift in how owners and operators went about planning and buying technology.
"Although we understood the task ahead, we still underestimated the glacier speed at which breaking the RFI/RFP mindset would go. With hindsight I wouldn’t have changed the approach but would have encouraged more manageable expectations to all parties concerned (the team, developers and investors)."
Shiji says by increasing its ownership of SnapShot it wants to "double-down" on making the business an industry-wide platform.
SnapShot's core product is a data analytics platform that allows chains and independent hotels to organize their channel development and revenue streams.
Shiji itself took a "$486 million investment from ecommerce giant Alibaba earlier this year.