Hospitality-tech Startup Viqal Raises €500k in Financing

Hospitality tech start-up Viqal has raised a new round of funding, totaling pre-seed funds raised at €500k from Rabobank , Holland Startup and two angel investors which will help them further develop their customer intelligence solution for physical spaces.

Viqal is co-founded by Bram Haenraets, Daniel Formolo and Marcelo Resmini with a focus on the hospitality industry, where they address the challenges of staff shortages and unfair online review practices by using its technology powered by acoustic smart sensor and A.I. to analyze how people experience their visit in real-time and activate existing staff on-the-spot to better attend to guests.

Viqal’s solution is live at large data-driven hospitality organizations like, for instance, Millennium Hotels & Resorts in Singapore and Van der Valk in Amersfoort, The Netherlands.

The world is rapidly urbanizing and Viqal is on a mission to connect the physical and digital world through 1 million smart sensors by 2030 so cities can be smarter, safer and more inclusive.

Bram Haenraets, Co-founder & CEO: “Hospitality is a good example of an industry seeing a cultural change after turbulent times in which data and analytics are leveraged to achieve operational excellence.

This investment will help us to expand our team, scale our smart sensor network and significantly increase data gathering from physical spaces”

Robbert-Jan Hanse, CEO of Holland Startup: “While other investors abandoned the hospitality industry, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we at Holland Startup were bullish on this opportunity.

Just like Cornelis de Houtman first visited Lisbon in the 16th century to gather information about the Portuguese trade route to the East Indies, Bram sailed the turbulent waters of the COVID-19 pandemic, anticipating hard lockdowns. He navigated Viqal time after time into safer waters, from Amsterdam to Lisbon to Singapore.

Bram and his team showed resilience, determination and grid. We are very happy for the team as they received additional capital from the likes of Rabobank. Well deserved!”

Rabobank Startup & Scaleup Team: “It is a great proposition from Rabobank to finance startups in an early phase and to support their growth, Viqal is the perfect candidate to offer the Innovation Loan.”