Otel AI, the company building AI co-workers for hotel General Managers and hotel owners, has raised €2.8 million in total funding within six months of launch.
Playfair, the London-based pre-seed VC firm, led the latest round with participation from Nebular (which doubled down after leading an initial €800k round last year). Several angel investors, including Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed, also joined the round.
The company is already working with leading hotel groups across Ireland and the UK, where GMs are getting hours back in their day and catching opportunities they previously didn’t have time to act on — without adding headcount. The funding will be used to accelerate product development and support customer-led expansion into the UK, Europe, the US, and the UAE.
As part of the round, Floor Bleeker, former Group Chief Technology Officer of Accor — where he led a team of 1,500+ technology professionals and was responsible for a budget exceeding $250 million — has joined Otel AI as a strategic advisor.
The problem: hotels run on disconnected systems
Hotels operate some of the most complex environments in the service industry. A typical General Manager starts the day across multiple systems, reports, and dashboards — before they’ve even spoken to a guest or their team — trying to piece together what happened yesterday, what’s going on today and are there any problems coming in the future.
The tools already exist — but the work of connecting them, interpreting them, and acting on them still falls on people with limited hours in the day. The result is that GMs walk into data every morning, not decisions. Institutional knowledge lives in people’s heads rather than in systems. And when key staff leave, their reports, alert thresholds, and market intuition leave with them.
Otel AI is ISO 27001 certified and GDPR compliant, giving hotels a secure way to analyse their data and automate actions using AI — without sensitive information ever leaving their environment.
Not another dashboard. A co-worker that gets the work done.
Otel AI sits on top of a hotel’s existing systems and turns them into a single operational layer. Instead of a GM switching between tools and manually stitching together decisions, the AI co-worker works across systems on their behalf: retrieving data, analysing it, and delivering finished work.
Hotels describe what they need in plain English. A daily pricing analysis. A payroll alert. A board pack. These tasks — called Flows — run automatically and deliver the output straight to the team’s inbox. No dashboard to check. No spreadsheet to build. GMs get the full picture without logging into a single system. Just work, handed off and returned done.
This is an AI co-worker that doesn’t just surface insights — it acts on them across systems. Every output is fully traceable to source data. Every action stays under human control. The AI handles the operational workload. The team makes the decisions that move the business.
Early results: more decisions, better outcomes
Otel AI is live with design partner hotels across Ireland and the UK, including the O’Callaghan Collection, Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel, Johnstown Estate, and Killarney Park. Early results show what happens when hotel teams get hours back in their day — with a noticeable impact on both revenue and cost performance across properties.
At The Alex Hotel in Dublin, RevPAR grew 8.6% year-on-year in the first three months, not by adding headcount, but by giving the existing team an AI co-worker that handled the daily analysis across systems. Revenue was the first department. The same co-worker now handles F&B, payroll, and guest reviews — across every back-office function.
Mark Scott-Lennon, GM and Owner of Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel, summed up the challenges facing hotel GMs and owners: “We have so many systems, and my time is limited. What I’ve always wanted is a system to connect with all our systems and do the heavy lifting of research to give the best information quickly to make better decisions and support the team. Otel does this while also flagging where we have problems and where we have opportunities. This makes better use of my time so I can spend more time with our team and our guests.”
Scaling product and expansion
Expand the product and engineering team, deepening coverage across all hotel back-office departments.
Accelerate expansion into the UK, Europe, the US, and the UAE, targeting independent hotels and groups operating 3–50 properties seeking operational leverage through AI rather than additional staff.
Otel AI has grown from 2 to 14 people over the past year and plans to continue hiring across engineering, product, customer success, and commercial roles in 2026.
Leadership commentary
Paul Ryan, CEO and Co-Founder of Otel AI, said: “Every general manager I speak to tells me the same thing — they walk in every morning, open six or seven systems, and spend the first hour just trying to understand how their hotel is doing. By the time they have the picture, the morning is gone. We built Otel so that when a GM walks in, the picture is already there. The problems are flagged. The work is done. They walk into decisions, not data.”
Chris Smith, Partner at Playfair, said: “In a market saturated with siloed software tools, a clear problem remains: hotels are under resourced, under optimised and leaving millions of dollars on the table. Otel AI solves that problem by pulling together data from every aspect of a hotel’s business, analysing it, making recommendations and then executing them. Having previously led the pre-seed in Nory and seen their success in the restaurant space, we’re excited to now be backing Otel AI, an AI co-worker for hotels that drives revenues and profitability”
Floor Bleeker, Strategic Advisor to Otel AI, said: “It’s great working with Otel AI. The platform has an incredible potential to disrupt hotel operations. It’s the first AI service that can be enabled within a few clicks including the integration with major PMS providers. I encourage anyone working in a hotel to try this out and start supercharging your existing systems with a powerful AI layer.”
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