Startup Stage: Fikäfi wants to make payments more efficient for hotels

Fikäfi

Singapore-based Fikäfi helps hotels automate payments, calling its approach the Android to Mews' Apple.

The name Fikäfi comes from the Swedish tradition of "fika," which involves stopping to find value in the small moments, like stopping for coffee. 

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Hotels lose 70% of direct bookers at payment—not to a competitor, to friction they never see. By the time a payment report surfaces the failure, the guest has checked in somewhere else. We call them shadow guests. Fikäfi finds them, recovers them and prevents the next ones from disappearing—without new tools, without training and without touching the systems hotels already run.

Mews validated embedded payments in hospitality. Fikäfi is the infrastructure everyone else needs—the Android to their Apple, built for every booking engine and full-stack PMS on the market. We're live across 10+ countries, soon to be embedded in 6,000+ hotels through multiple partnerships and growing, and 60% through our pre-seed round.

Phase 1 recovers the guest. Phase 2 owns the relationship—automated guest engagement and loyalty built into the payment layer, giving hotels all the benefits of an expert marketing operation without the headcount or the cost.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

The business model moves through partners: hotel groups, booking engines, PMS providers and an expanding set of hospitality-adjacent platforms. They embed Fikäfi; their clients get the capability without a separate procurement decision. We earn a margin on transaction value. The unit economics work at the property level and scale with the partner. Partnerships give us a large footprint fast—direct sales and DMC partnerships follow in subsequent quarters to deepen market penetration.

The technology does three things no horizontal payment provider was designed to do.

1. It schedules payment collection to match the actual condition of sale, not the booking moment, not the panic moment, the right moment.
2. It surfaces every payment failure in real time: the declines, the expired links, the abandoned checkouts that generic gateways bury because they only report what succeeded.
3. It fetches, charges and reconciles OTA virtual credit cards automatically.

A 15-property Saudi group saw a 58% lift in direct revenue in the first two weeks. That's not an edge case. That's what happens when you turn the lights on.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths

• Mews opened the door to embedded payments in hospitality. Fikäfi is the infrastructure everyone else needs, the Android to their Apple, built for every booking engine and full-stack PMS on the market
• Improved conversion rates and increased direct revenue from day one—local and international PSPs can't compete on coverage, price or hospitality-specific functionality
• 58% direct revenue uplift in the first two weeks with a 15-property group
• 6,000+ hotels reached through multiple partnerships—large footprint, fast
• Embeds into existing systems—no change management, no training, no friction
• Unit economics proven at property level across 10+ countries

Weaknesses

• Pre-seed stage—limited brand recognition outside partner network
• Distribution pace dependent on partner sales motion until direct sales and DMC partnerships activate in subsequent quarters
• Lean team until round closes

Opportunities

• Every PMS and booking engine that hasn't solved embedded payments yet is a conversation we're already having
• OTA dependency is the number one pain point in independent hospitality globally. We reduce it by eliminating the payment friction that causes it and giving hotels the tools to recover what they've lost.
• $85 billion addressable market across MENA and South Asia with no direct competitor
• Phase 1 recovers the guest. Phase 2 owns the relationship—automated guest engagement and loyalty built into the payment layer, giving hotels all the benefits of an expert marketing operation without the headcount or the cost. If the evolution of SaaS is managed services, we just became the poster child.

Threats

• Our presence in markets that well-capitalized competitors haven't prioritized makes us a natural acquisition target for any large payments or hospitality technology platform looking to expand without starting from scratch.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspectives?

A guest wants to book direct. The payment experience talks them out of it—a large upfront charge months before arrival, when the OTA is offering the same room, same rate, pay on arrival. The hotel loses the booking to a channel it was already paying for and incurs a 20% tax. The guest didn't defect. The payment pushed them.

Hotels only see what completes. Everything that fails—the declines, the abandoned checkouts, the expired links—disappears without a trace. No alert. No report. No recovery. The industry calls it 30% leakage. Our figures suggest it's closer to 70%. The difference between those two numbers is the low hanging fruit left to rot.

Both pain points result from payment infrastructure designed for e-commerce, not hospitality.

Now that the product is built, what's your strategy for customer acquisition?

We go to market three ways.

1. Embedded partner payments. We will soon reach 6,000 hotels through three signed agreements with more in the pipeline. Mews started the embedded payments race—we serve their regional competitors, platforms with longstanding client relationships, local tax advantages and switching costs that make displacement unlikely. One conversation, thousands of hotels.
2. Direct. Improved conversion and revenue recovery are an easy sell to hotel groups. A 15-property Saudi group. 58% direct revenue uplift. Two weeks. More in the pipeline. A dedicated direct sales team follows as the round closes.
3. DMC net payouts. DMCs pay hundreds of supplier hotels on net rates, hemorrhaging margin to SWIFT fees and manual reconciliation. Fikäfi replaces that entirely. Each hotel in the DMC's network receives a notification and registers once to collect—like PayPal's mass payout but built for hospitality. No SWIFT. No manual reconciliation. No currency gaps. The DMC saves on transfer costs. The hotel gets paid faster, in local currency. Fikäfi sits in the middle of every transaction.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

Three hundred fifty calls in six months to hotel operators I've worked with for over a decade. Half had no idea the problem existed. The other half had either accepted it or were attacking it with tools that were making it worse. The market: $600 billion+ in global hotel room revenue, 60% of it sitting with independent properties that run on legacy systems, pay 15%-25% to OTAs and have never had a payment layer built for them. Our focus is MENA, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean—$85 billion, no dominant competitor. Global PSPs either price themselves out or aren't licensed to operate there. We have claimed our niche.

How and when will you make money?

We already do. TPV sits at just under $1 million annually—one group and a handful of independents. Enough to prove the model works at the hotel level.

The numbers are simple. Average transaction value of $420. We charge 4.45% gross and keep 1.43% net—$6 free cash on every payment processed.

The embedded partner strategy changes the equation entirely. At 10% penetration of Elektraweb's portfolio—500 hotels, two payments a day—daily TPV hits $420K. Annual TPV $153 million. ARR at 4.45% gross reaches $6.8 million. Free cash $2.2 million. From one partner, at modest penetration, in year one of a full deployment.

We have three signed partnerships and more in the pipeline. The model is proven. The distribution is now the business.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Three co-founders. Fifty years of combined experience in hospitality, fintech and scaling startups across MENA, Europe, and South Asia—with exits.

Andre Privateer spent seventeen years developing and operating hotels across four continents, running $20 million distribution operations, leading digital transformation across a 30-property portfolio in South Asia, co-founding a hospitality technology company that reached $9 million annual revenue and 400,000+ transactions within three years. Colgate University. Visiting professor, Sorbonne.

Imran Saeed is the founder and CEO of Encore Pay, with 14 years prior at TPS, one of the largest payment technology companies in the region, rising to VP of business development across MENA. Twenty years building and scaling fintech infrastructure across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.

Shahjahan Chaudhary founded and exited multiple ventures in Pakistan and MENA, launched over 100 startups through the National Incubation Center in Karachi, and serves as managing partner at Machinelab Ventures. One of the most connected operators in the South Asian tech ecosystem.

Together: a hotel operator who understands payments, a payments veteran who understands scale and a venture builder who understands markets. The problem required all three.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

66% of the founding team is brown. Our first hire was a woman. We operate across three continents in markets that the industry's dominant voices rarely visit. Diversity at Fikäfi isn't a policy. It's what we are.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Change management. Hotels know the problem exists. Most can't act on it—too many competing priorities, shrinking teams, budgets under pressure. The gap between "this is exactly what we need" and actually implementing it is wider than any sales deck prepares you for.

We solved it three ways. For direct clients, we removed the implementation burden entirely—our Revenue Protection & Growth service manages the online channel and rebooks shadow guests as an outsourced function. No new hire, no new process. For embedded partners, we integrate directly into the software hotels already run, which means the human variable disappears completely. The hardest part of founding this business turned out to be the architecture of the solution itself.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact. Why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

Luck matters. Bill Gross of Idealab studied hundreds of startups and concluded that timing accounts for 42% of the difference between success and failure. We'll take those odds.

The embedded payments wave is breaking now. Independent hotels are fighting harder than ever to claw back margin from OTAs. Payment infrastructure built for hospitality didn't exist two years ago. We showed up at the right moment with the right product in large markets that frighten everyone else.

And we don't take ourselves too seriously. Fikäfi is named after the Swedish tradition of fika—stopping for coffee, slowing down, finding value in the small moments. We built a company that recovers money hotels didn't know they were losing and named it after a coffee break. If that isn't timing, we don't know what is.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

Multiple embedded partners fully deployed. Irrefutable transaction volume and market share among small to midsize hotel groups in three of our eight key markets. Pre-Series A closed. Two sales resources per market moving the direct and DMC channels at pace.

An industry that once questioned why loyalty belongs in the payment flow now accepts it as standard practice. New habits formed. Systemic change.

What is your endgame? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

The most likely outcome is acquisition by one of the global payments players as competition for vertical dominance heats up. We have what they want and can't easily build — hospitality-specific infrastructure, embedded partner relationships, and regulatory groundwork across markets they've sidestepped. 

The guest payment data we accumulate along the way is a separate story entirely. One we'll tell at Series A.