In a field of cows with snow-capped mountains in the distance, three young men in lederhosen announce their latest round of funding
“We are building the first true agentic system for lodging, moving hospitality away from buying software to buying results.”
“Not San Francisco, not London, not even Milan. From the Alps. Mostly cows,” they say, in an attention-grabbing video posted on social media.
The founders of Smartness - Tommaso Centonze, Luca Rodella, and Eugenio Bancaro - a hospitality tech startup based in Trentino, north Italy, have raised €47m Series B from Italian VC firms United Ventures, CDP Venture Capital, and Partech.
Selling outcomes
Launching with a single revenue management product in 2020, Smartness has expanded into property management, guest communications, CRM, upselling, and payments - solutions that work both as standalone modules and as an integrated end-to-end suite.
Luca Rodella, CEO and co‑founder of Smartness, said: “A structural shift is underway from supplying software to delivering concrete results. We began by taking direct responsibility for our customers’ performance. The numbers today are proving us right.”
Smartness serves more than 5,000 hotel and accommodation providers across 41 countries, with a particularly strong footprint in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria.
Smartness claims to deliver average revenue up by 30 percent, OTA commission down by 20 percent and 50 percent more direct bookings for its customers. Are such bold claims credible?
John Burns, president, Hospitality Technology Consulting, commented: “For small independents, whose primary sales channel is OTAs, who do not use revenue management or distribution technology, switching to a latest generation PMS could have a very substantial impact.”
Reasons to invest
Explaining the reasons behind the investment, United Ventures partner Fabio Pirovano commented on the calibre of the leadership team and added that Agentic AI represents, “one of the most consequential shifts in enterprise software since the move from on-premise to cloud, and Smartness is among the few European companies positioned to ride it from the front.”
Hospitality is particularly fertile ground for this transition, he said: “The operational surface area is enormous, the labour intensity is real, and the gap between what enterprise chains can afford and what a small independent hotelier can deploy has only widened. This is the gap an agentic platform can close at scale, and it is precisely the gap Smartness has been engineering toward since 2020.”
There is a further reason that PMS vendors attract VC investment. Modern PMS platforms increasingly bundle mandatory payment processing into their services, often at higher-than-interchange rates and with long-term contractual lock‑ins.
In many cases, the payments processing business is worth more than the PMS subscription revenue. “Private equity investment may not speak solely to the PMS’s capabilities or performance,” said Burns.
For hotel owners and operators who are thinking of switching their PMS provider, it is important to look carefully at the payment processing terms and conditions.
Continuous M&A
Roughly half of the €47m investment in Smartness will fund M&A, with Smartness already in advanced negotiations on its next acquisition, while the remainder will accelerate hiring and international scaling across the DACH region and beyond.
This latest funding announcement underlines two key trends in hospitality technology: particularly strong investment in PMS, and Agentic AI ushering in a transition from selling tools to selling business outcomes.
In the twelve months to March 2026, forty hospitality technology companies raised a combined US$1bn, according to a research paper published by Abode Worldwide.
PMS companies raised more money than any other category, with Mews attracting $300m and another six providers, including Boom, Amenitiz and Arbio, attracting a further $108m.
Well-funded PMS companies are moving deliberately toward becoming the single system that hotels need to run their businesses. This typically requires buying and absorbing smaller startups.
Founded in 2012, Mews, for instance, has made several acquisitions, most recently Flexkeeping, a housekeeping automation tool, and DataChat, an agentic AI platform.
Agentic systems
Investors are betting on a compounding effect, says the Abode Worldwide report. Unified systems will generate more data over time, which will improve their AI, and make customers less likely to want to switch to another system.
Shahar Goldboim, co-founder & CEO, Boom, an AI native PMS, said: “Investors saw the shift from software-as-a-service to business-as-a-service, where the system doesn’t just support the operator – it becomes an active participant in running the business.”
Richard Valtr, founder, Mews, added: “Instead of relying on a 'Frankenstack' of disconnected tools that need constant manual input, properties are moving toward AI agents that can proactively coordinate revenue, operations, and guest service in real time."
During the dot com boom, the prefix ‘i’ was used generously – iMac, iDrive, iVillage – as a signifier of the latest cutting-edge technology.
Today, calling new systems ‘agentic’ sounds impressive and futuristic. Agentic AI is often used loosely to refer to a workflow with some automation, and possibly an LLM.
“AI is now an obligatory topic in every hotel systems conversation,” commented Burns. “Yes, certain aspects of it, including agentic AI, are useful. In some cases, they will be game changers, but we are still very early in the AI game.”