Airbnb leads $58M WeRoad round, hires CEO to run hotels
▼ Summary
– Airbnb led a $58M Series C in WeRoad, taking a 10% stake and a board seat, while WeRoad CEO Andrea D’Amico leaves to run Airbnb’s hotels division.
– The investment structure is unusual for Airbnb, which historically grew its Experiences business organically rather than through equity stakes in specialist operators.
– WeRoad runs multi-day organized tours for millennials and younger travelers, using a curated pool of tour guides, and the new funding is earmarked for US expansion.
– The deal pairs Airbnb with a minority position in group travel and a senior operator with 18 years of Booking.com hotel experience to lead its hotels push.
– The $58M investment values WeRoad at around $580M post-money, a roughly 4-5x mark-up from its Series B valuation in late 2023.
Airbnb has made a notable strategic move in the travel tech space, leading a $58 million Series C funding round for WeRoad, a Milan-based group-adventure-travel platform. As part of the deal, the short-term rental giant secures a 10% equity stake and a board seat. Simultaneously, WeRoad’s CEO since 2022, Andrea D’Amico, is departing to take the helm of Airbnb’s hotels division. The investment was first reported by TechCrunch and Skift on Wednesday.
This arrangement breaks from Airbnb’s usual playbook. Historically, the company has grown its Experiences and tours business internally, avoiding equity stakes in niche operators. By backing WeRoad and poaching its CEO, Airbnb achieves a tighter form of integration. It gains a minority foothold in the group-tour category while acquiring a seasoned operator with two decades of experience running Booking.com’s hotel business across EMEA. D’Amico spent 18 years at Booking.com before joining WeRoad in 2022.
For WeRoad, this round marks a milestone in European travel tech. The company specializes in multi-day organized tours led by a curated pool of guides, targeting the millennial and younger crowd,a demographic traditional tour operators often miss. WeRoad raised an €18 million Series B in late 2023 and has grown steadily since. The new $58 million injection brings total funding to roughly $85-90 million, with funds explicitly earmarked for U. S. expansion.
The U. S. market presents a tougher challenge. While European group-adventure travel has thrived on millennial demand for structured social experiences, the American landscape features stronger incumbents like Intrepid, G Adventures, and white-label tour layers within Expedia and Airbnb’s own Experiences network. WeRoad’s bet is that its proprietary tour-guide platform and social media brand on Instagram and TikTok can translate across the Atlantic. The real test will be U. S. customer acquisition costs.
Strategically, the Airbnb angle is more compelling. The platform has long tried to diversify beyond short-term rentals, with mixed results on Experiences and a harder slog in the hotel-equivalent category. Hiring an executive with serious Booking.com hotel credentials, paired with a minority stake in a fast-growing group-travel platform, signals Airbnb is ready to deploy real balance-sheet capital to accelerate this push, rather than relying solely on product-team experiments.
The valuation implied by Airbnb’s 10% stake for $58 million is roughly $580 million post-money, marking a 4-5x increase from WeRoad’s Series B valuation of around $120-150 million in late 2023. That’s a strong but not extraordinary step-up for a profitable, growing European travel-tech company in today’s funding climate.
WeRoad’s new CEO has not been publicly named. A board search is underway, with an internal candidate expected to serve on an interim basis. The Series C is designed to fund 18 months of U. S. launch operations.
(Source: The Next Web)
