Earlier this summer, hospitality technology specialist Mews made headlines when it cut 15% of its workforce, eliminating 170 roles.
Just six months prior, the company also announced significant funding in January, raising $300 million in Series D funding and driving its total valuation to $2.5 billion.
According to CEO Matthijs Welle, however, the layoffs and funding are unrelated.
“[The restructuring] came from a different level of thinking around an AI organization. How do you enable that kind of organization?” Welle said during a CEO Spotlight interview with PhocusWire’s Linda Fox.
“We wanted to just unleash AI and allow team members to really do exciting things, but often they get stuck into, ‘Well, we need to have a meeting about it,’ and then decisions were slowing down.”
Welle also touched on Mews’ acquisition strategy, with DataChat marking its fourteenth addition.
According to Welle, the company is focused on two types of acquisitions, property management systems, which are sunset over time, and products, which are embedded into the research and development organization.
Welle noted that Mews is less focused on the latter, as its product builders—a new role created in the reorg—can develop iterations in-house faster and at a lower cost.
“The value of what we would previously pay to a company, that would run into the millions, is now no longer worth it, because actually you could very quickly spin up a product like that,” Welle said.
This also addresses the much-discussed fragmentation in hospitality tech.
“We knew we had to bring it together into one operating system, because one of the things you get with hoteliers, they want a single throat to choke. They want only one vendor that serves them across the board, and that’s the thing we’ve tried to solve for,” he said.
“Now, with AI on top of it, it gets really exciting because that operating system, we can actually embed it ... What we’ve done is really make sure that when you log into Mews, you’ve got all of these systems into one single platform, and instead of it feeling like multiple products, it's actually features of the same products.”
The CEO also discussed his dynamic with founder Richard Valtr, plans to expand reach with large hotel brands and more.
See below for the full interview.
CEO Spotlight: Matthijs Welle of Mews