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A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas.

If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.

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This week in AI: 

  • Google Meet adds AI makeup feature

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  • Shop Walmart directly in ChatGPT 

    OpenAI makes another big move to maintain their monopoly on the AI space. Would you shop in ChatGPT? 

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Company background: Mews

Founded: April 2013  

Team size: 1,200 

Funding to date: $410 million – investors include Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Kinnevik, and Tiger Global Management. 

MRR: Not disclosed 

Growth metric: $200 million in revenue in 2024. $1.3 billion valuation in 2025. Powering 12,500 properties across 85 countries. 

“Throughout 2025, growth in our portfolio of active properties has remained steady, with monthly year-on-year gains ranging from 69% to 90%. This demonstrates not only a strong pipeline of new properties but also sustained retention.”

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How this ex-Hilton director built an AI-first hospitality tech giant that generates $200M in revenue 

From the age of four, Matthijs Welle wanted to be a hotelier. The moment he first stepped foot in a hotel, he was gifted with the clarity that many spend their lives chasing. After working through Hilton’s fast-track program and working in every department, Welle became deeply frustrated with the technology (or lack of it). It was 2012-13 and Hilton was still running disk-based operating systems. When Hilton finally upgraded to Windows, it somehow made matters worse. 

This was around the time when Welle met Richard Valtr, who was building his own hotel and was curious about the “innovations” the bigger chains were implementing. “I told him how backwards the industry was, and at 30 years old, with no mortgage or kids, I decided to take my first real risk and quit to join him in building Mews,” Welle said. 

Today, Mews is used by thousands of hotels worldwide to automate manual tasks, personalize guest experiences with AI, and increase property revenue. Mews won the best PMS at the 2025 Hotel Tech Awards. 

“Our core vision hasn’t changed – we’ve always been building a CRM, not just an inventory management system, with the guest profile at the center,” Welle said. But that vision has been supercharged by AI. 

“We collect data from every touchpoint – reservations, housekeeping notes, past stays, integrations across the hotel – and AI now lets us summarize that back to staff in real-time. Our AI Smart Tips feature is viewed over five million times weekly by hoteliers, giving them instant, actionable snapshots of each guest. The system remembers small details in bookings and surfaces that information during the next stay, which is exactly the kind of personalized service we envisioned from day one but couldn't fully deliver until AI made it scalable,” he explained. 

Go-to-market plan 

The co-founders initially thought they’d build the entire PMS system in the first year and wouldn’t know what to do with all those developers on-staff by year three. “We now employ more developers and designers than ever before. We’ve learned that building hospitality technology is incredibly complex, because hotels are one of the most multifaceted businesses when you consider all the touchpoints from restaurants to housekeeping to payments.” 

Mews’ launch-to-market was unconventional. “We took deals that were 10 times larger than the previous one and got customers to pay upfront. Then, immediately invested all that money into R&D to build what they needed.” 

Investors told them they were spreading themselves too thin by targeting multiple markets and segments at once, but as a European start-up in a small country, Welle felt they had to internationalize from day one.  

“We couldn’t afford to be a big fish in a small pond. Many of our earliest customers are still with us today because we delivered on those ambitious deals,” he shared. 

Industry disruption 

Product-market fit came from rethinking the entire category. They weren’t just building another inventory management system. 

“We centralized the guest experience and built a front-end for guests to check-in online, which seemed obvious to us but wasn't how competitors approached the problem. The real breakthrough was payments, which now drives 50% of our revenue and creates incredible stickiness. Customers stay with us for 9-10 years on average.” 

“By removing the constant friction of asking for credit cards and tokenizing payments so no employee ever sees card numbers, we created an Uber-like experience where transactions become invisible. That depth of integration, combined with our marketplace of best-in-class partners, lets us serve luxury hotels even though we might not have every feature in-house.” 

Scaling strategies 

Mews’ net revenue is consistently 120%, meaning customers who start the year with the platform are worth more at the end without Mews having to constantly find new customers. 

“This happens because once hotels go live with Mews, they don’t leave. They buy more products from us as they add restaurants, bars or automate workflows. The payments integration is particularly powerful because it drives more revenue per hotel than any competitor,” Welle said. 

They’ve also captured great market share in specific regions, such as Benelux and the Nordics where Mews manages one in three hotel rooms. This creates a rich data environment that makes the AI even more valuable. 

As the old saying goes, it’s easier to serve current clients than it is to acquire new ones. It’s not as sexy as “new business” but it works. 

Welle’s journey is a successful example of a start-up founder following his intuition and committing to having a product that evolves with technology. This 12-year-old hospitality tech unicorn is growing faster than ever, because of the AI integrations. 

Takeaways 

  • Build from operational pain, not from what AI can theoretically do. “We didn’t set out to build AI features. We set out to solve the problem of scattered guest data that staff couldn’t access quickly enough.” 

  • Adoption should feel natural, not forced. “The key is that our AI Smart Tips live exactly where teams already work, which is in the guest profile and reservation calendar.” 

    If you’re building with AI, make sure it fits seamlessly into existing workflows and delivers immediate, tangible value that people can see in their daily work, not some future vision that requires a behavior change. 

  • Early decisions inform future success. Constraints force founders to make focused decisions that eventually drive success. Think beyond the difficult 1–3-year mark.

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