Wayfarer completes its Series A.
Scaling Materia Connect, the hotel operations AI platform that works with existing PMS

Wayfarer K.K. (headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo; Representative Directors: Winston Chu and Lans Koide; "Wayfarer") today announced that it has completed funding in its Series A round, led by Canon Marketing Japan MIRAI Fund (managed by Global Brain Corporation).

Wayfarer opened its first hotel in Kyoto in October 2019. Today it operates 13 hotels, with 7 more scheduled to open. Across Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Aichi, the gross asset value (GAV) of the hotels it operates or will open has passed ¥60 billion. Built by testing solutions against the problems that come up on site every day, Wayfarer launched its in-house operating platform and software suite, Materia Connect, in November 2023. Materia Connect now runs across all 13 hotels Wayfarer operates. With this funding, Wayfarer will grow its hotel business further and accelerate the development, commercialisation and hiring behind Materia Connect, the operations AI platform it built by running its own hotels. Looking ahead, Wayfarer plans to offer an AI hotel operations platform that hotels can adopt without replacing their PMS, the core system every hotel runs on, and to take the model it built in Japan, hotel operations and technology as one business, overseas.

Funding overview

Bringing AI to the front line of hotel operations

AI is rapidly changing digital work. But in industries like real estate and hotels, where physical spaces and people's work are tightly intertwined, adopting AI is still a hard problem.

Within real estate, hotels are one of the most operationally complex businesses. They run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and have to coordinate reservations, pricing, payments, guest service, cleaning, maintenance, staffing and sales in real time.

Yet most hotels run on a patchwork of disconnected systems. A great deal of work on site is still done by hand, and information is rarely structured or connected.

Wayfarer believes that adding individual AI tools to this environment will not change how hotels operate at the root. What hotels need is a shared foundation that lets AI read the data it needs and work with existing systems to handle reservations, guest service, pricing and on-site operations.

That is why we built Materia Connect, an AI platform for hotel operations.

AI capabilities without replacing the PMS

Materia Connect does not replace a hotel's PMS (property management system). It is designed as a shared foundation that uses APIs to connect the systems and operating data a hotel already has, external AI agents and its day-to-day workflows, so that automation and AI can be built on top.

What sets it apart is that hotel operations and software development are never separated.

Wayfarer runs its own hotels, and its operations and technology teams work on the same problems. That gives the team a deep understanding of how the work actually gets done, and every feature is deployed, tested and improved in real hotels.

Wayfarer sees Materia Connect not as a tool that makes one task more efficient, but as the infrastructure hotels need to keep adopting digital technology and AI over time.

Key capabilities proven in hotel operations

• Revenue management　AI dynamic pricing, daily rate adjustments and real-time competitor rate monitoring, lifting RevPAR by up to 25%.
• Booking and guest experience　A multi-property booking engine, a guest app, 90-second online check-in, digital payments and AI chat in one system.
• On-site operations　Automates access control, housekeeping, review analysis, shift management and supplies ordering, reducing routine work for staff.
• AI agent integration　Uses the PMS and operating data as a shared foundation, connecting external AI agents and business tools through a single API.

※ The RevPAR improvement is the maximum achieved in Wayfarer's own operations. Actual results vary by property, location, scope of deployment, market conditions and other factors.

Technology born in hotel operations

Wayfarer did not start as a hotel technology company.

Founder and CEO Winston Chu spent about 10 years in Hong Kong investing in technology and consumer companies around the world.

In 2018, while researching hotel investments in Japan, he noticed the gap between the technology companies he had backed as an investor and hotel operations that still relied heavily on paper, phone calls, multiple systems and manual work.

"Could technology change how hotels are run?"

That question led him to found Wayfarer in October 2019.

Soon after its first hotel opened in Kyoto, the world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. With little hotel experience, Chu lived in the hotel for about nine months, working the front desk, cleaning, selling rooms and rolling out systems, and built the foundations of the business by running the hotel day to day.

Through and after the pandemic, Wayfarer grew from one hotel to several cities. Along the way it kept investing in its own technology, so that quality and productivity could stay high as the number of hotels grew.

The systems first built to run its own hotels have since grown into Materia Connect.

Own the hotel, understand the problems that happen there, build the solution as technology, and test it back in the hotel.

This cycle is the foundation of both Wayfarer's hotel business and its technology business.

Founder's comment

Wayfarer K.K., Founder and Representative Director
Winston Chu

"Ever since we started Wayfarer, people have asked us, 'Are you a hotel company or a technology company?' For a long time, the answer 'both' was hard for people to accept.

Putting technology to work in real hotel operations is not easy. Hotels are full of manual work, exceptions and disconnected systems, and they still have to run 24 hours a day without stopping. We learned on site that you cannot build technology people actually use by looking only at the problems on the surface.

That is why Wayfarer has kept investing in both: running hotels ourselves, and building the technology that runs them. Together, they have given us a foundation that is hard to copy: real operating environments, real data and a deep understanding of the work.

Now the rapid progress of AI has brought a turning point. More and more hotel owners and operators are asking us how to bring AI into their business. But to get the most out of AI, the systems, data and processes underneath have to be connected. We have spent years building that foundation.

This funding is a major milestone on the path we have walked so far. We will keep growing our hotel business while bringing Materia Connect to other hotel operators, and move one step closer to a world where technology and AI support the operation of hotels and, in time, every kind of physical space."

Potential collaboration with Canon Marketing Japan

Following this investment, Wayfarer and Canon Marketing Japan Inc. ("Canon MJ") will explore future collaboration in hotels and tourism, including the Journey CX area that Canon MJ is focused on.

The travel and accommodation market is growing, but for hotel owners and operators it is not easy to pick out, from the many technologies on offer, the solutions that bring real value to their own operations, and then put them in place.

We believe that combining Wayfarer's hotel operating know-how, global perspective and the Materia Connect API and AI platform with the Canon MJ Group's technology, customer base and solutions could create new value in hotel digital transformation, guest experience and operating efficiency.

Candidate themes include trials in hotels Wayfarer operates and in partner properties, integration between Materia Connect and Canon MJ Group services and applications, and future deployment models. The two companies plan to study how these could be put into practice.

※ Specific areas of collaboration will be decided in future discussions, with individual agreements signed as needed.

Comment from Canon Marketing Japan Inc.

In travel and hospitality, we aim to create travel and tourism experiences that are safer, more comfortable and more sustainable for both travellers and service providers. We see one of Wayfarer's strengths in how it turns what it learns running its own hotels into better technology, refining its value in real operations. Through this investment, we look forward to combining Wayfarer's hotel operating know-how and the Materia Connect platform with our group's customer base, technology and solutions, and to shaping new value for the hotel and tourism industry together through repeated trials in real hotels.

Ryusei Abe, R&B Promotion Headquarters, Canon Marketing Japan Inc.

Comment from Global Brain Corporation

Tourism is driving the growth of Japan's economy. We invested because we think highly of Wayfarer's vision and its ability to execute: it brings real hotel operations and software development together to take on the industry's structural problems. Built from the ground up and aimed squarely at inbound demand, its technology platform delivers both efficient operations and a high-quality guest experience. We look forward to seeing this platform, refined in Wayfarer's own hotels, rolled out across the industry as new infrastructure for hotel operations, and contributing to the further growth of Japan's hospitality industry.

Jiro Kumakura, General Partner

Through conversations with CEO Winston and a management team with global and diverse experience, and through visits to their hotels, we were struck by their sincere commitment to making the hotel industry better, and felt strongly that they have the potential to change the market. Above all, we see their ability to feed careful on-site testing straight into software development and into real operations as the company's lasting competitive advantage. As lead investor, we will fully support the company as it rewrites the industry's conventions.

Tomoyuki Otsu, Director

What comes next

The funds raised will mainly be used for:

• Expanding the hotel business in major cities, starting with Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto
• Developing Materia Connect's AI, API, data and automation capabilities, and offering it to other hotels
• Hiring, mainly in product, engineering and hotel operations
• Building the business foundations for future overseas expansion

For Wayfarer, this is also a starting point: taking the know-how and technology it has built in hotel operations beyond hotels, to the problems shared by every kind of real-world asset.

The need to build software, data and AI into real-world assets is growing, but the more complex the operation, the harder that is to do.

By bringing real operations and software engineering together, Wayfarer aims first to make complex hotel operations more efficient and simpler.

About Wayfarer K.K.

Wayfarer is a hospitality technology company that brings hotel operations and technology development together to build the next generation of hotel operating infrastructure. It feeds the data and know-how from running its own hotels back into product development, to raise productivity in hotel operations and improve the guest experience. Through its in-house hotel operating infrastructure, "Materia Connect" and the "Kabin API", it connects PMS, reservations, check-in, payments, housekeeping, AI and operations management.

Its in-house operations AI platform, "Materia Connect", connects a hotel's systems, data, processes, automation and AI, helping hotels run with fewer people, keep operating quality consistent and stable, and make better use of their data.

With a global team from hotel operations, real estate, product and engineering, Wayfarer starts with hotels and aims for a future where technology and AI support the operation of every kind of real-world asset.

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Wayfarer K.K.