Beyond Financial Planning & Analysis

When we started profitize in summer 2024, we did not want to build another reporting tool.

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This is not my first time building in hospitality software. I previously founded RateBoard, a revenue management system used by more than 1,500 hotel customers.

That experience gave me a very direct view into how hotels operate on the revenue side — and how much more fragmented and underserved the operational and financial side of the business still is.

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Coming from revenue management, I always believed that improving revenue is important — but it only creates real value when you understand what happens on the cost side at the same time. One additional euro in revenue does not automatically translate into one additional euro in profit. And sometimes, pushing revenue without understanding the cost impact does not actually improve the business.

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That perspective shaped how I looked at optimization early on: not in isolation, but always in context.

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Why profitize Exists

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We started profitize because we believed one of the world’s largest industries was operating with a major blind spot.

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Hospitality has become increasingly sophisticated at managing revenue. Over the last decade, the industry has made enormous progress in revenue management, distribution, digital marketing, CRM systems, and guest acquisition technology. Leading operators today optimize pricing, demand forecasting, and channel performance with a level of sophistication that barely existed a few years ago.

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At the same time, large parts of the industry are still far away from that level of digitalization — even on the commercial side. Many hotels continue to rely on fragmented systems, manual processes, and operational intuition across critical workflows.

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But when you move beyond revenue and look at how hotels manage costs, operational efficiency, capital allocation, and financial decision-making, the technology gap becomes even more visible.

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Critical decisions are still fragmented across spreadsheets, disconnected software, consultants, emails, PDFs, and manual workflows. Finance teams spend enormous amounts of time collecting data instead of acting on it. Operators manage highly complex businesses without having a real-time operational view of their financial engine.

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And for a large part of the industry — especially independent and smaller hotel operators — there often is no internal finance team at all.

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Financial management is outsourced to external accountants, consultants, or service providers. Operational data is collected manually across multiple systems, processed externally, and often only becomes available weeks or even months later.

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As a result, many hotel operators still make important operational decisions without having a clear and real-time understanding of their financial performance.

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This gap is exactly why profitize exists.

Today, after closing our €1.4 million seed round, we want to share where we believe the industry is heading and what role profitize will play in shaping that future.

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Hospitality Has Advanced Commercially - But Operations Are Still Underserved

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Hospitality technology has evolved enormously over the last decade.

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But when you move beyond revenue and look at operational finance, the gap becomes much larger.

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Labor planning, purchasing, insurance, financing, forecasting, investment decisions, supplier management, and operational benchmarking are still highly fragmented across spreadsheets, disconnected systems, emails, consultants, and isolated tools.

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Yet these areas represent enormous financial leverage.

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In hospitality, cost structures and operational efficiency often influence profitability just as much as revenue itself.

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A few percentage points in labor efficiency, purchasing optimization, financing costs, or operational planning can fundamentally change margins and cash flow.

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Still, most operators lack systems that allow them to manage these areas continuously and in real time.

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That is the opportunity we see.

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Why This Becomes Possible Now

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For a long time, building this kind of operational financial layer was simply not realistic.

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Hotel data lived in disconnected legacy systems. Integrations barely existed. Operational information was difficult to centralize and even harder to interpret in real time.

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That is changing now.

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Cloud infrastructure is becoming standard across hospitality. Many property management systems (PMS) have become significantly more open over the last years, enabling far better access to operational data than was possible in the past. At the same time, digital processes such as e-invoicing are accelerating across Europe, making financial data more structured, more consistent, and far easier to process automatically.

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Together, these shifts are quietly transforming the foundation of hospitality operations: from fragmented, manual data collection toward structured, machine-readable financial and operational flows.

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And on top of that, AI has reached a point where it can move beyond static analysis into actual operational reasoning.

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For the first time, hospitality data is becoming sufficiently connected and accessible to build intelligent operational systems on top of it.

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We believe this creates an opening that did not exist five years ago and one where entirely new software categories can emerge.

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From FP&A Software to an Operational Finance System

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Today, many people know profitize as FP&A software for hotels.

That was our entry point.

But it was never the full vision.

We believe hospitality needs a new software category: an operational financial system built specifically for hotels.

Not another isolated point solution. Not another dashboard. And not software that only explains what happened last month.

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We believe hotels need a system that continuously helps operators understand, manage, and optimize the financial side of their business in real time.

Our ambition is to build the financial operating system for hospitality.

A unified layer connecting operational and financial workflows across the business.

A system where financial management becomes continuous instead of retrospective.

Where operational decisions and financial visibility are directly connected.

Where fragmented workflows become one operational environment.

And where software increasingly helps operators make better decisions every day.

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Why Point Solutions Are No Longer Enough

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One thing we noticed very early is that hospitality does not suffer from a lack of tools.

It suffers from fragmentation.

Hotels already use dozens of systems: PMS, accounting tools, procurement software, workforce planning tools, BI dashboards, revenue systems, external consultants, and manual spreadsheets.

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The problem is that these systems rarely operate together intelligently.

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Data gets duplicated. Context gets lost. Teams work in silos. Operational and financial decisions become disconnected from each other. And operators spend huge amounts of time manually stitching information together instead of acting on it.

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We believe the next generation of hospitality software will not be built around isolated workflows. It will be built around connected operational intelligence.

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The Shift From Reporting to Operations

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Historically, hospitality software mostly acted as a system of record.

Systems stored information. Humans interpreted it manually. Decisions happened elsewhere.

We believe AI fundamentally changes this model.

The next generation of software will not only display information — it will actively participate in operations.

This shift is especially powerful in hospitality because the industry is highly operational, highly repetitive, and extremely data-rich.

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In the future, software will increasingly help operators make thousands of small operational decisions more effectively than ever before.

Instead of simply showing labor costs, systems will recommend staffing adjustments based on occupancy, department performance, and operational benchmarks.

Instead of static procurement reports, systems will identify purchasing inefficiencies, benchmark supplier pricing, and streamline procurement decisions.

Instead of reviewing monthly cash flow statements weeks later, operators will continuously understand liquidity, risk exposure, and operational performance in real time.

Instead of fragmented communication between operators, finance teams, ownership groups, banks, insurers, and consultants, workflows will increasingly become integrated into one operational environment.

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That is where we believe hospitality is heading.

And that is what we are building profitize toward.

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AI Agents for Financial Operations

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One of the developments we are most excited about is the emergence of AI agents inside operational finance.

Most finance teams today are overloaded with repetitive workflows: collecting and cleaning data, comparing supplier invoices, updating forecasts, preparing reports, following up internally, monitoring deviations, validating budgets, and benchmarking performance.

These workflows consume enormous time while creating relatively little strategic value.

We believe AI agents will fundamentally change this.

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At profitize, we envision intelligent systems that work alongside operators and finance teams as operational copilots.

Agents that continuously monitor cost structures. Agents that identify anomalies automatically. Agents that recommend actions before problems escalate. Agents that optimize staffing efficiency. Agents that streamline purchasing workflows. Agents that support financing and investment decisions.

Importantly, this is not about replacing people or simply cutting costs.

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Hospitality will always remain a human business.

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The goal is to remove operational friction and repetitive financial work so teams can focus on what actually matters — especially the guest.

Better systems should not reduce hospitality. They should improve it.

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Hospitality Needs Its Own Financial Infrastructure

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Hospitality is not a generic industry.

It combines real estate, operations, staffing, logistics, procurement, finance, and customer experience into one highly dynamic environment.

That complexity is exactly why generic financial software often struggles in hospitality.

Hotels need systems that understand seasonality, department structures, labor intensity, multi-property operations, ownership structures, operational benchmarking, asset-heavy investment cycles, and real-time operational volatility.

This requires infrastructure purpose-built for hospitality.

And we believe the companies that define the next decade of hospitality software will not simply provide isolated tools. They will provide infrastructure that becomes so central to daily operations that hotels could not remove it without losing visibility over their own business.

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That is the long-term position we want profitize to occupy.

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Building With Operators, Owners and Management Groups

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One thing became very clear to us early on: the best hospitality technology cannot be built from the outside. It has to be built together with the industry.

Hospitality is too nuanced and operationally complex for theoretical software development.

That is why we spend enormous amounts of time working directly with operators, finance teams, ownership groups, and management companies.

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Many of the ideas shaping our roadmap come directly from real operational pain points we repeatedly see: finance teams overwhelmed by manual reporting, operators lacking visibility across properties, ownership groups struggling with fragmented data, delayed decision-making caused by stale reporting cycles, and procurement inefficiencies hidden across decentralized operations.

The more time we spend inside these operations, the more convinced we become that hospitality deserves far better infrastructure than it has today.

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Our goal is not to build software that looks impressive in demos.

Our goal is to build systems that genuinely improve how hotels operate.

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The Long-Term Opportunity

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We believe hospitality is entering a major technological transition.

Cost pressure is increasing. Operational complexity is rising. Labor shortages continue across the industry.

At the same time, AI capabilities are accelerating rapidly.

The operators who can combine operational excellence with real-time financial intelligence will have a massive advantage over the next decade.

And over time, connected operational and financial infrastructure across properties can unlock entirely new forms of benchmarking and intelligence for the industry.

That opportunity is still massively underserved today.

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What the Seed Round Enables

Closing our €1.4 million seed round is an important milestone for us — not because it changes our vision, but because it allows us to accelerate it.

On paper, the amount may seem relatively small in the context of what we are trying to build. But we have deliberately chosen to stay in a constrained environment at this stage.

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We believe constraints create focus.

They force clarity on what truly matters, what actually moves the product forward, and what should not be built yet.

And in our case, this is especially important because we are not just building software — we are building a fundamentally new layer for how financial operations in hospitality work.

At the same time, we believe AI has completely changed what is possible with small, focused teams.

What previously required large organizations, heavy coordination, and multiple layers of execution can now be built with significantly smaller teams — if the system, tooling, and product thinking are right.

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In many ways, we believe a highly focused team today can achieve what previously required teams 5 times the size.

This combination — disciplined focus and AI-driven leverage — is what allows us to move faster than traditional software companies in this space.

This funding gives us the ability to invest deeper into product development, AI infrastructure, integrations and team expansion.

Most importantly, it gives us the ability to build long term.

We are not building for the next quarter.

We are building infrastructure we believe hospitality operators will rely on over the next decade.

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And we are still only at the beginning.

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The Road Ahead

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Our ambition for profitize is clear:

To become the financial operating system for hospitality.

A system where finance becomes operational.

Where visibility becomes real time.

Where fragmented workflows become connected.

And where operators can make faster and better decisions across labor, procurement, financing, investments, and day-to-day operations.

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We believe the next defining hospitality software companies will not just help hotels sell better.

They will help hotels operate better.

That is the future we are building toward.

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To our customers, partners, investors, and team — thank you for believing in this vision early.

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Now we build.

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