Besty AI, which specializes in artificial intelligence (AI) automation for short-term rental providers, has closed its seed round with a total of $3.75 million in funding.
The round was led by Armory Square Ventures, with Ridge Ventures, Bungalow and Grand Ventures participating.
The investment includes $1.5 million announced in August 2024 and earmarked at the time for platform improvements and team expansion. Over the past year, the company has scaled from eight to 22 employees and continues to hire, it said.
Founded in 2023, Besty began as a communications tool but expanded to offer AI automation across multiple aspects of the short-term rental business, including guest communications, operations and revenue. Its features include an agentic, conversational upselling engine capable of filling orphan nights and selling early and late checkout and other custom upgrades.
Sam Dundas, cofounder of Besty, said short-term rentals is a “fast-growing, overlooked market” that is surprisingly well suited to AI.
“This was a sleepy enough industry that it wasn’t the obvious place for AI to land, compared to massive monolithic markets like healthcare or insurance,” Dundas said.
“But the beauty of this industry is that the service is delivered through an inanimate object that doesn’t need to be staffed. As long as the property is clean, accessible and what you paid for, it can in theory be run almost completely autonomously.”
The platform integrates with major property management systems, including Guesty, OwnerRez, Hostaway, Hospitable and others.
Besty now serves 300 customers and 30,000 properties across 25 countries, with plans to grow its enterprise business.
The funding will be used to further develop its product and to power sales and marketing, the company said.