CAMO Hospitality, an infrastructure platform for hotel room service, has closed of its $4 million seed funding round to accelerate its expansion across the U.S. The funding follows more than 200 percent year-over-year revenue growth and growing demand from hotel brands, owners and managers.
CAMO will use the funding to enter additional U.S. markets, support portfoliowide deployments currently in pilot and continue developing its technology platform.
“We hit a few milestones at once,” CAMO founder and CEO Kevin Rohani told Hotel Management. “The model had proven out well enough to move the platform asset-light, meaning we run through partner kitchens rather than carrying our own, which is what makes entering a new market a matter of weeks instead of quarters. At the same time our partners' growth needs were outpacing what we could serve.” The bigger shift, he said, was in how the company sells. “We spent years knocking on doors one hotel at a time, and we're now in direct conversations with the largest brands and management companies. That's a different kind of engagement with different expectations, and we wanted to be well resourced going into it rather than raising in the middle of a rollout.”
The investment comes as hotels look for new ways to capture guest spending and gain greater visibility into guest behavior during the stay. According to company estimates, guests spend more than $5 billion annually on restaurant delivery to U.S. hotel rooms, while roughly nine in 10 hotels do not offer traditional room service. Much of that spending currently flows through third-party delivery platforms, which does not provide hotels with revenue, guest data or control over the experience.
“Over the last fifteen years, guests got used to digital ordering and on-demand service everywhere else in their lives,” Rohani said. “They walk into a hotel assuming hospitality is ahead of that curve, and the industry is actually well behind it. Not just web ordering, but the whole infrastructure underneath it.” One reason for this has been a focus on distribution, he added. “Part of why is that hotels spent that same period solving distribution. Direct booking, rate parity, loyalty, channel management. Enormous effort went into owning the reservation, and comparatively little went into owning what happens once the guest is in the room. So the guestroom ended up being the least connected part of a very connected business.”
Investors in the round include Anthony Lacavera, founder and chairman of Globalive; Rajan Hansji, CEO of Hansji Corporation; Azim Jamal, CEO of Pacific Reach; Parsa Rohani, co-founder of Neudesic/Timu; Evan Weiss, co-founder of LWHA; and a group of hotel owners currently using CAMO at their properties. “Hotels have digitized everything except the transaction that happens inside the room,” Lacavera said in a statement. “That is a large market with no incumbent. CAMO is building the infrastructure to own it.”
Room Service Logistics
CAMO provides hotels with fully managed room service under their own brands, handling the ordering technology, local kitchen fulfillment, delivery logistics, and guest support behind the scenes. The model requires no kitchen buildout, capital expenditure, or additional hotel headcount. Hotels retain control of the branded guest experience while gaining a new revenue stream and visibility into guest ordering behavior that traditionally sits outside the hotel ecosystem.
“We supply the infrastructure that was never built,” Rohani said. “Ordering, fulfillment, delivery, guest support—all under the hotel's brand. No capex, no equipment, no added headcount, and a 22-minute average delivery time across more than 60 properties.”
Orders average approximately $45, with most hotels earning $1,000 to $5,000 in net monthly profit through CAMO’s revenue-share model. CAMO also manages delivery and guest support, with average delivery times of approximately 22 minutes, while providing hotels with order-level data on what guests purchase, when they order and how their behavior changes throughout the stay. Hotels access order-level data through CAMO’s hotel portal, and many direct their revenue share toward staff and guest tools like guest recovery credits, employee recognition, and local sales efforts that fall outside an approved operating budget.
The company currently operates across more than 60 hotel properties in six U.S. markets and is working with several major hotel brands and management companies for broader portfolio rollouts. Longer term, CAMO plans to expand the in-room commerce model beyond dining into other areas of on-demand services for guests.
“Hotel brands invest millions to make the guest’s experience just right,” said Tuscano, who led onsite digital and mobile product development at Marriott. “To hand-off the in-room moment to an outside marketplace kills the guest’s relationship with the brand. CAMO keeps the guest experience on-brand and inside the hotel ecosystem.”