WhyHotel booked a $20M Series B funding round, plans for national expansion

Alternative lodging service WhyHotel has booked a $20 million Series B funding round.

The funding round was led by Harbert Growth Partners with participation from a group of investors including Camber Creek, Highland Capital Partners, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and more. The fresh funding will help WhyHotel expand nationally, offer additional products and services, and accelerate its plans for Hospitality Living, the real estate development arm of the company.

Launched in 2018, WhyHotel operates pop-up hotels in new luxury apartment complexes as the building works to fill the vacancies with leased tenants.

“WhyHotel is building the bridge that allows hospitality and multifamily products to converge, without long-term lease obligation that is mismatched to short-term consumer contracts,” WhyHotel cofounder and CEO Jason Fudin told Technical.ly.

WhyHotel currently has just shy of 100 employees working across its D.C. headquarters in the historic Uline Arena, satellite office in San Francisco, and at pop-up locations in Seattle, Arlington and Tysons, Virginia. This Series B follows its last funding round, a $10 million Series A back in December 2018. The startup’s total capital raise now amounts to over $35 million since its inception, reports the company.

Fudin said the company plans to expand to multiple cities in 2020, and also speed up the rate at which WhyHotel opens new popups across the U.S.

This announcement comes after the startup welcomed some “top-tier executives” to its team earlier this year, Fudin said. Following these key hires, WhyHotel plans to bring on a number of additional hires “to continue investing in the infrastructure required for real estate sales, marketing, revenue and technology,” he added.