Montréal-based travel content monetization startup Stay22 has completed a total turnaround since losing 90 percent of its revenue in 2020.
“It’s a great way to finally get a tap on the back.”
Andrew Lockhead, Stay22
On Thursday, the 105-person startup announced it raised $122 million USD ($167 million CAD) in an all-equity, minority growth investment from private equity firm Summit Partners. Outside of $1.5 million USD, it’s the only external investment the company has taken in its rollercoaster journey to profitability.
“It’s a great way to finally get a tap on the back,” Stay22 co-founder and CEO Andrew Lockhead told BetaKit in an interview. He did not share the company’s valuation or say how much of the investment consisted of secondary issuances.
Stay22 was founded in 2016, after Lockhead and co-founder and chief innovation officer Hamed Al-Khabbaz joined Montréal’s FounderFuel accelerator. The startup, which originally focused on affiliate revenue for booking accommodations for in-person events, was finding its stride when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, heavily impacting in-person events and tanking its income. Investors pulled out, and the company was forced to lay off two-thirds of the team.
But Stay22 kept going, vowing to bootstrap instead of chasing venture dollars. It pivoted the following year to focus on helping creators monetize travel content and has since seen rapid traction, growing revenue by more than 1,000 percent by the end of 2024.
The company’s tech offers a way for travel publishers, bloggers, and influencers to monetize their content through affiliate links with booking sites such as Booking.com and Expedia. For example, a travel YouTuber may want to embed links to vacation options in their video description so they can earn a commission when viewers book a stay. Stay22 automates this process using AI to increase bookings and conversion rates, taking a fee and redistributing part of these higher earnings to the creator.
RELATED: Montréal’s seventh Startup Community Awards get a new home, and a new tone
Now, it works with more than 5,500 creators and processes more than $1 billion USD in transactions. According to a January investor memo viewed by BetaKit, Stay22’s January monthly revenue was $7.2 million USD, growing 127 percent year over year. It also reached more than 800 million users, growing 178 percent year over year.
Its annual recurring revenue is between $70 million and $100 million CAD, according to The Globe & Mail. Stay22 has also become somewhat of a community leader for Montréal tech, regularly sponsoring speaker events and taking home people’s choice awards.
Its latest investor, US-based Summit Partners, has invested in Toronto-based adtech company StackAdapt and Edmonton-based startup Jobber, as well as other companies focused on conversational AI, social media, and the influencer economy. The firm is taking two seats on Stay22’s six-person board, Lockhead said.
“What drew us to Stay22 is the combination of a structural market shift and a team building the infrastructure to support it,” Colin Mistele, managing director at Summit Partners, said in an emailed statement to BetaKit. “We view the creator economy as a core driver of how consumers discover and purchase experiences and products, with scalable monetization tools becoming increasingly important.”
Lockhead said the investment was a way to get a strategic partner at the table, as Stay22 looks to expand from travel content into monetizing retail links—allowing travel creators to earn additional revenue from promoting luggage or sunscreen, for example.
“We can finally unlock new opportunities for those creators,” Lockhead said.
Beyond its retail expansion, Lockhead said Stay22 plans more of a push into monetizing content on social media. The company is hiring for about 50 positions, in marketing, sales, and engineering roles.
Feature image courtesy Stay22.