Travel platform Siteminder raises $100M in pre-IPO round

Open hotel commerce platform, Siteminder revealed a a pre-IPO funding round of over AU$100 million in mid-September, comprised of both primary and secondary capital.

The company says this represents an evolution of its shareholder base with Fidelity International, a leading investment and asset management company joining the registry.

Existing shareholders include AustralianSuper, equity funds managed by BlackRock, Ellerston Capital, Pendal Group, and Washington H. Soul Pattinson also participated in the pre-IPO funding round.

Early investors in SiteMinder who skipped the round included Bailador Technology Investments, Les Szekely of Equity Venture Partners, and TCV, although a spokesperson said they remain supporters and shareholders of the company.

Despite the pandemic, in FY2021, SiteMinder sustained revenue of over AU$100 million, achieved a 40 per cent increase in the number of customers using its payments and other transaction-based products, and kept its revenue decline to less than 6 per cent in constant currency terms.

SiteMinder’s valuation remains at over AU$1 billion based on this latest pre-IPO funding round. Its valuation after a January 2020 finding round closed was $1.1 billion, and while it didn't disclose the current valuation, it seems at least to have held the line.

Sankar Narayan, CEO of SiteMinder, said the company's shareholders had not wavered over the past 18 months. "We thank all of our shareholders for their ongoing trust as we continue to perform against an evolving industry backdrop.”

The company has continued to innovate during the travel downturn with initiatives including:

• The growth of its metasearch and hotel payments programs — Demand Plus and SiteMinder Pay — through the May 2021 additions of trivago and the capability for hotels to process guest payments from within SiteMinder’s platform. It claimed Demand Plus and SiteMinder Pay have experienced higher adoption rates than any of SiteMinder’s other offerings in the last year.
  
  
• The trial of a new digital acquisition strategy for small hotel operators, to complement SiteMinder’s existing go-to-market models.
  
  
• The May 2021 launch of SiteMinder Multi-Property, a product designed to simplify the complexity involved with distribution for hotel chains and groups.
  
  
• The introduction of the SiteMinder Partner Program in November 2020, which recently signed its 500th member and brought SiteMinder’s total ecosystem to more than 1300 partners worldwide.
  
  
• The April 2020 launch of the World Hotel Index, a publicly-available tool sourcing data from the hotels and 400 hotel booking channels globally connected to SiteMinder, to allow hotel operators to see trends in their countries and regions.

According to Narayan, “We have maintained high levels of engagement with customers and partners to deliver consistently strong business performance and demonstrate SiteMinder’s resilience during these difficult industry conditions."

“After joining SiteMinder's capital raise of over AU$100 million in January 2020, at a time where we could not have foreseen the events ahead, what we have seen is SiteMinder show tremendous agility, resilience and innovation, particularly as the needs of their customers and partners have rapidly shifted,” said George Batsakis, Senior Portfolio Manager from AustralianSuper.

"The unprecedented impacts of the last 18 months have proven the importance of easy-to-use technology platforms for hotels, and we are pleased to be growing our support of SiteMinder as the company continues to provide these much-needed services to support its customers."