INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Impala has raised another round of funding just a few months after raising an $11 million Series A round
This time, the startup is raising a $20 million Series B round led by Lakestar
Latitude Ventures is also participating in the round.The company is building a service that works pretty much like Plaid, but for hotel
asking hotels to switch to an entirely different property management system, the company is upgrading those systems with a modern API
This way, you can build applications that query hotel data directly with a few lines of code
You get a standardized JSON response from the API.Impala is currently compatible with a handful of property management systems
The company is still adding more systems in order to cover a wider range of hotels.Three hundred hotels are currently working with Impala,
such as Accor hotels (Mercure) and Hyatt-branded hotels
The company currently has a backlog of 3,500 hotels
It really shows that the industry has been waiting for a product like this.While Impala is still focused on surfacing data in an
easy-to-code manner, the company is already thinking beyond read-only data
The startup wants to let developers book rooms directly using the Impala API.It could open up hotel bookings to many other services
Services selling train tickets and flights could upsell you with hotel rooms.In order to offer rooms on the usual hotel booking services
many hotels currently work with channel managers to send out information to multiple services at once
In the future, Impala could replace those channel managers with its API.
