The idea reportedly arrived on a trip to the London Olympics in 2012. Two Belgians were watching a city fill with visitors and, presumably, watching hotel prices move. Sources give just that one line, so the rest is the company's record, not a scene.
Gino Engels and Matthias Geeroms started in Ghent. Neither came from the hotel trade as far as profiles show. Engels had spent about three years at AB InBev's UK arm. Geeroms had spent six years as a transfer pricing specialist at the Belgian tax authority, a job built on spotting numbers that did not add up. A third name, Adriaan Coppens, appears as co-founder in some profiles.
The old one described a tool; the new one, Lighthouse, described a platform.
That oddity is the hook. Tax inspectors read prices for a living, and a hotel's room rate is one of the most volatile prices anywhere. The company they built, OTA Insight, collected rates from booking sites and showed hoteliers what rivals were charging, hour by hour. The name pointed at online travel agents, the middlemen every hotel had to read.
For years it grew quietly. By November 2021 it had raised $100 million in total, after an $80 million Series B led by Spectrum Equity. The company moved its headquarters to London. Then it started buying: Transparent in Madrid, Kriya RevGen in Dallas, and Stardekk, a Belgian channel manager, in 2024.
In 2023 it dropped the OTA Insight name. The old one described a tool; the new one, Lighthouse, described a platform. In November 2024 KKR led a $370 million Series C, taking total funding to about $470 million. Reports put the valuation at over $1 billion, though one headline says $2.4 billion and sources disagree; the Dealroom list used here says $2.4 billion in November 2026.
What it has become is an everyday tool for more than 70,000 hospitality businesses, with over 700 staff. It has won the HotelTechAwards five years running.
The cost of that rise is not documented in the sources I could reach. Founder interviews about doubts, money running thin or fights are missing, and no revenue figure is public. An honest profile has to say so.
What remains is a pattern worth copying. Neither founder was a hotelier. They arrived with a skill, reading prices critically, and aimed it at an industry that mostly guessed. A first-time founder does not need the industry's résumé. Sometimes the outsider's habit is the product.