Hospitality technology Mews has acquired DataChat,
a U.S.-based artificial intelligence (AI) company specializing in natural
language processing, for an undisclosed sum.
Mews described the acquisition, which has been
made through its venture arm, as a major step in its “mission to build fully
agentic hospitality systems, where intelligent agents autonomously manage
day-to-day operations, optimize performance and empower humans to focus on the
guest experience.”
DataChat, which was initially launched in 2017
as a research project, works in the retail, financial services and
telecommunications sectors.
The company’s platform enables users to access
their business data and generate insights, workflows and predictive models
without coding.
“From bookings to check outs, every guest
moment generates data—positioning hospitality among the world’s most
insight-rich industries. The true opportunities lie in unlocking that data to
power smarter, more intelligent operations,” said Richard Valtr, founder of
Mews.
“With DataChat’s exceptional team and technology, we’re moving beyond
systems that simply assist hoteliers – toward intelligent platforms that evolve
in real time, learning from every interaction.”
Mews hopes DataChat’s integration will
accelerate the development of agents, both autonomous and semi-autonomous,
within the Mews ecosystem. These agents will operate across various hotel
functions, including reservations, distribution, operations, revenue
optimization and guest experiences, enabling hotel companies to build experiences.
“At DataChat, we’ve built technology that
bridges the gap between human understanding and machine capability,” said Viken
Eldemir, CEO of DataChat. “By combining conversational interfaces with
automated data reasoning, we're going to be building agents that understand
intent, reason across data sources and act autonomously, which will bring an
entirely new level of intelligence and personalization to hospitality. This
will mean Mews hoteliers can get answers to questions without having to run or
interpret reports.”
The acquisition of DataChat is
Mews’ third this year after it announced it had acquired Clarity in January and
more recently, Flexkeeping. The company also announced funding of $75 million
this year and said the investment, lead by Tiger Global, would go towards
expansion in Europe and the U.S.