iRiS, a leading mobile guest experience platform for the hospitality industry, has closed its Series A investment round, raising £6.5m led by US investor JMI Holdings and appoints a new Executive Chairman
LONDON, UK, September 6, 2016- iRiS, a leading enterprise applications platform provider creating innovative mobile and web solutions for the global hospitality industry, today announces the completion of a strategic investment round of £6.5m. The funding from JMI Holdings and other new and existing investors will allow iRiS to increase its international scale and broaden and accelerate product development of its mobile digital platform solutions for the hotel, healthcare and F&B industries. The company also announced the appointment of Roger Taylor as Executive Chairman
The Series A financing builds on an exceptional year for iRiS which has seen the scalability of its platform proven through the deployment into 2,600 Accor hotels in just 4 months, adoption by Starwood, Marriott and Whitbread, further deployment in Citizen M and Kempinski, its first installation in Japan with NEC / Prince Group, and the signing of prestige properties including Atlantis Dubai and Mohegan Sun Casino, USA.
With the appointment of Roger Taylor iRiS further strengthens its leadership team and will benefit from Roger's international technology leadership and business scaling experiences where he most recently led the transformation and exit of Quadriga Worldwide. In addition to Roger, other new members of the Board include Charlie Noell of JMI Holdings and Gilbert Chalk of 24 Haymarket.
Jason Jefferys, CEO, iRiS comments, "Roger, Charlie and Gilbert bring significant experience in key areas including business scalability, risk and business development and consider their involvement and financial support a strong endorsement of our rapid progress and prospects as a leading company within our space. We now have more confidence, speed and discipline to grow the business, to take on competing companies and accelerate our sales and marketing efforts. We are incredibly passionate about our platform, products and people, and are excited to have JMI on board to help further our ability to deliver tomorrow's guest experience, today."
The multi-tenanted cloud-hosted Guest Experience Platform (GXP®) is the no.1 tailored management portal offering businesses complete centralised control over a brand's content management, guest communication and interactive services, across the entire estate – with a proven ability to increase revenue, reduce costs and successfully improve the end-to-end guest experience.
iRiS also offers highly-customisable applications intelligently designed to provide guest experiences in-room and in hospital suites, in the hotel lobby, at bars and restaurants, by the poolside and more. The iRiS product suite brings guest services to life and greatly improves communication with multi-lingual translations and instant two-way messaging. Supporting all major devices, operating systems and browsers, the GXP®'s open APIs allow hospitality businesses to reach guests at every touch-point before, during and after their stay, returning powerful analytics for on-going marketing success. Charlie Noell, JMI Holdings comments, "JMI invests in software companies with proven business models, rich intellectual property, high recurring revenue, and long-term growth potential. We believe the hospitality market will continue to see a shift in mobile adoption as groups increase their reliance on guest experience-centric programs and look to scale those efforts. iRiS is a powerful solution for the industry and we are excited to collaborate with and support them as they work to build a great company in an exciting category."
