Smartness Raises €47M Series B for AI Hospitality Growth

Italian TravelTech Startup Smartness Secures €47 Million in Series B Round to Fuel European Expansion

The European travel technology landscape just witnessed one of its most significant AI funding events of 2026. Smartness, a Trentino-based vertical SaaS company, has officially closed a €47 million Series B funding round — marking a landmark moment not just for the company, but for the entire Italian tech ecosystem. This is the largest Series B ever raised by a vertical SaaS startup in Italy, and it sends a clear signal that AI-powered hospitality technology is no longer a niche segment — it's a full-blown industry revolution in progress.

The AI funding news comes at a time when the hospitality sector across Europe is rapidly moving away from manual processes and generic software toward intelligent, outcome-driven technology platforms. Smartness sits squarely at the intersection of this shift. What the company is building isn't just software — it's a new operating model for hotels and vacation rental businesses, one where AI handles everything from pricing and bookings to guest communication and property management.

A Funding Round That Sets Records

The €47 million Series B round at Smartness was structured to include both primary and secondary equity, along with a debt component — a sophisticated financing structure that reflects the maturity and investor confidence the company has earned since its founding in 2020. The round was co-led by United Ventures and CDP Venture Capital SGR, two of Italy and Europe's most prominent institutional investors in the growth-stage technology space.

Equally noteworthy is the continued backing from Partech, the global venture capital firm that originally led Smartness' €13 million Series A round back in 2023. Partech's decision to double down with participation in this Series B round is a strong endorsement of Smartness' product trajectory and market execution. Earlier investors including Techshop, the founders of Bending Spoons, Azimut, and Rialto also contributed to the company's earlier funding history. With this latest round now closed, Smartness has surpassed €60 million in total capital raised since inception — a remarkable achievement for a company that is barely five years old.

Fabio Pirovano, Partner at United Ventures, spoke openly about what made this investment compelling: "Our investment in Smartness stems from the calibre of a founding team that combines first-hand knowledge of the hospitality sector with a clear product vision, and from the company's ability to develop diverse and complementary solutions, all designed to improve the operational efficiency and experience of industry professionals. In a market that is evolving from pure software to technologies capable of performing tasks on behalf of the customer, Smartness has all the elements to establish itself as a European category leader — a trajectory that fits seamlessly into our investment strategy and which we intend to support in its international expansion."

This AI funding news from Smartness is particularly significant in the context of Italy's broader startup ecosystem, which has historically lagged behind Germany, France, and the UK in attracting large-ticket venture rounds. The fact that a vertical SaaS company from Trentino has now pulled off the biggest raise of this kind in Italian history is a powerful statement about the potential of deep-tech, sector-specific platforms when built with the right vision and execution.

From a Single Pricing Tool to a Full-Stack AI Platform

Smartness was founded in 2020, in the middle of one of the most disruptive periods for global travel — the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than waiting for conditions to normalize, the founding team used the downtime to build their core product: Smartpricing, a dynamic pricing engine that used algorithmic intelligence to help hotels and vacation rental operators set optimal rates in real time. At the time, dynamic pricing for hospitality was largely dominated by expensive, enterprise-level tools that small and mid-sized operators couldn't afford or easily access.

Smartness changed that equation. By offering a pricing product that was simultaneously powerful and accessible, the company quickly found product-market fit and began scaling. But Luca Rodella, CEO and co-founder of Smartness, had a bigger vision. The goal was never to be just a pricing tool — it was to become the operating system for independent hospitality businesses. Over the next few years, Smartness systematically expanded its product suite to cover CRM, payment processing, property management systems (PMS), guest communication, and, most recently, AI-driven operational tools that automate core workflows without human intervention.

This expansion strategy mirrors what the best vertical SaaS companies in the world have done — land with one essential product, earn customer trust, and then expand horizontally to capture more of the workflow. The results have been remarkable. Since its Series A in 2023, Smartness has grown more than sixfold. The company now serves over 5,000 customers across 41 countries and reports consistent monthly organic growth of approximately 10%, even excluding any inorganic contributions from acquisitions.

In 2025, the company made a strategic move with the acquisition of MyComp, a digital agency specializing in web consulting, revenue management, digital marketing, and hotel management solutions. This acquisition added significant consulting and service delivery capabilities to Smartness' technology-first model, making it easier for hospitality operators to not just adopt the platform but extract maximum value from it.

The Vision: An "Agentic" AI Future for Hospitality

Perhaps the most forward-looking aspect of Smartness' strategy is where the company is headed next. Luca Rodella has been explicit about his ambitions: he wants Smartness to become a fully "agentic" AI platform for the hospitality industry — a system that doesn't just provide data and insights but autonomously executes tasks on behalf of hotel managers and property owners.

In a statement about the funding round, Rodella said: "We see an opportunity to become one of the leading global players in our sector and the leading provider of AI technology for hotels and non-hotel accommodation. A structural shift is underway: from simply providing software to delivering tangible results. We embarked on this journey back in 2020, taking direct responsibility for our clients' performance. The figures today are proving us right. If we look at the leading global SaaS players in the hospitality sector, we have been among the fastest, if not the fastest, ever to reach — and significantly exceed — €10 million in turnover. We believe we have what it takes to quickly reach €100 million in revenue and, over time, build a company with over €1 billion in turnover."

The concept of "agentic AI" — where AI systems take initiative and complete end-to-end tasks rather than just assisting with them — is rapidly becoming one of the most discussed frontiers in enterprise technology. For hospitality, this could mean an AI agent that automatically adjusts pricing based on competitor data, demand signals, and local events, then updates availability across all distribution channels, responds to guest inquiries, and flags maintenance issues — all without a human lifting a finger. This is the future Smartness is building toward, and the €47 million Series B provides the financial runway to make it a reality.

The company has indicated that the fresh capital will be deployed across two primary vectors: organic product development to deepen the AI capabilities of the existing platform, and strategic acquisitions in Europe that can extend the company's market reach and product portfolio. Given Smartness' track record with the MyComp acquisition and its already impressive 41-country footprint, there is strong reason to believe that both vectors will be executed with discipline.

Why This AI Funding News Matters for the Broader Hospitality Tech Sector

This latest AI funding news from Smartness doesn't exist in isolation — it is part of a broader wave of investment activity in European travel and hospitality technology that reflects growing confidence in the sector after years of post-pandemic hesitation. Between 2019 and 2023, travel startup funding was noticeably subdued. The pandemic wiped out years of growth overnight, and investors were cautious about re-entering the space before seeing clear signals of recovery.

Those signals have now arrived — and they are strong. In 2025, international tourist arrivals to Europe increased moderately, with some countries recording gains of 14–16% year-on-year. More importantly, travel spending across Europe grew by nearly 10% last year, according to industry data, putting more money into the pockets of hospitality operators and giving them both the incentive and the budget to invest in better technology.

This environment has sparked renewed interest from venture capital in travel tech, and Smartness' round is far from the only data point. Other notable European travel tech rounds in the current cycle include Dutch hotel management platform Mews, which raised €255 million in a Series D round, and several other region-specific players attracting significant growth capital. The sector is heating up, and companies like Smartness — with a proven product, a clear monetization model, and an ambitious AI roadmap — are perfectly positioned to benefit.

What makes Smartness particularly compelling from an AI investment perspective is the specificity of its focus. Rather than building a general-purpose AI tool and hoping to sell it across industries, Smartness has gone deep on a single vertical: hospitality. It understands the workflows, the pain points, the competitive dynamics, and the customer economics of hotels and vacation rentals better than almost any other technology company in Europe. That depth of domain expertise, combined with a technically sophisticated AI platform, is exactly what the best vertical SaaS companies are built on.

The company's growth metrics reinforce this narrative. A sixfold increase since Series A, 10% monthly organic growth, and 5,000+ customers across 41 countries are not the numbers of a startup still searching for product-market fit. These are the metrics of a company that has already found its footing and is now focused on scaling aggressively — which is precisely what this Series B round is designed to enable.

For the AI World Organisation and our global community tracking AI funding news, Smartness represents exactly the kind of company that deserves close attention. It is using AI not as a marketing buzzword but as the core engineering backbone of a platform that delivers measurable, real-world results for hospitality businesses. As the broader AI industry continues to debate the promise of agentic systems, Smartness is already building one — quietly, systematically, and with €60 million in total funding to back its ambition.