Hot Hotels, from IE to Techstars Boston

8th July 2015

A little piece of history was made in Boston on the 4th of June when Hot Hotels  become the first company from Spain to be accelerated by Techstars in the USA.

Two of the four co-founders of the company are IE MBA graduates. Adelaida Muriel Galet (MBA 2012) and Joseph Anthony Haslam (MBA, 2004). Completing the team are CEO Conor O´Connor who has a long history of starting Travel and Technology companies (Mydestinationinfo.com, Hoteles.es, Spansurf, Spantel)  and Jose Manuel Fernandez Muñiz who was previously General Manager of  Muchoviaje

Ade, who is the COO of the company, and will spend the entire 13 weeks of the intensive program in Boston until Demo Day on September 1st. Joe, who is the company Chairman, is currently skyping in to sessions but will go to Boston in August.

According to the Seed Accelerator Rankings, Techstars is ranked as the number two accelerator in the USA. There is a less than 1% acceptance rate and in accordance with a policy of transparency they publish year-by-year breakdowns participating companies.

As Joe Haslam explained in this interview in Novobrief, the main motivation was to get closer to the cluster of Travel Tech companies in the Boston area. Also the success of Kayak, Trip Advisor, ITA Software means that there are Venture Capital firms who know the sector well.

Hot was set up in January 2012 and has been live in the App store since March 2012. The company is based in Marbella and recorded a +2,100% year on year growth in bookings in 2014.

After bootstrapping for two years, Axon Group led a seed round of $1m in April 2014, Hot has since added another $1m in funding through Business Angels in Ireland as well as soft loans from ENISA and Emprendetur.

The full list of companies in Techstars Boston Class of 2015 is here.