Zingle Raises $11M in Funding to Build Out Company's Hospitality Solutions

With more than half of hoteliers planning to increase technology spending in 2019 on innovations that increase loyalty and personalize the end-to-end travel experience, business-to-customer messaging solution Zingle announced that it has raised an additional $11M in funding. Led by PeakSpan Capital, the funding will be used to build out the company's solutions and team as Zingle pushes further into hospitality.

Differentiated from chatbots that rely on keywords and scripted decision-tree logic, Zingle uses a combination of newly integrated artificial intelligence and human engagement to provide the type of white-glove service and guest experience that travelers demand. Through the ability to analyze message intent, Zingle is able to understand the guest need and reply with an automatic response, suggest a response for hotel staff to execute, or trigger an activity like creating a service ticket, streamlining operations.

With the acquisition of Philadelphia-based Presto AI, a hospitality-focused, computational linguistics, and data science team, the Zingle platform has evolved significantly. By analyzing and learning from millions of monthly messages exchanged between guests and hotels, the solution is able to categorize over 150 different intents, making responses smarter and more personalized. Message data is also stored in Zingle’s analytics and can be used to inform data-driven decisions, i.e., using message volume trends to make smarter staffing decisions.

Zingle has also recently made additions to its executive leadership team, recently hiring Jason Hekl, SVP of Marketing (formerly of SiriusDecisions and Coupa Software); Ellis Connolly, SVP of Sales (formerly of TrustYou and Cvent), and Eric Pannese, SVP of Product (formerly of NuORDER and Intuit). Each hire brings strategic leadership experience at venture backed SaaS companies.

To date, hotels and resorts such as Hyatt, Broadmoor, and Great Wolf have exchanged over 120 million messages with guests on the Zingle platform.