For decades, hotels around the world invested heavily in improving the guest experience, from online bookings and digital check-ins to smart rooms and personalized travel apps. But behind the scenes, many hotel operators still relied on spreadsheets, phone calls, PDFs and manual paperwork to manage billions of dollars in purchasing and financial operations.
While travelers experienced a wave of digital transformation, much of the hospitality industry’s back office remained fragmented and largely untouched by modern software.
Israeli startup Reeco wants to change that.
Founded in 2021 by Henrik Shimony and Omri Shalev, Reeco has built a procure-to-pay platform for hotels, connecting purchasing, inventory management, accounts payable and payments in a single system designed specifically for the hospitality industry.
The company has raised a total of $30 million from investors including Aleph, Net Capital Ventures, Joule Ventures and several hospitality industry executives and entrepreneurs.
What makes Reeco unusual compared with many Israeli startups is that its origins did not come from cybersecurity, military intelligence units or enterprise software. The idea came from a more traditional industry: hotels.
Shimony grew up in a family involved in hospitality and saw firsthand how hotels handle purchasing and supplier management. Despite spending large sums on food, supplies, maintenance and services, many hotels still manage much of that work manually.
Hotels often work with dozens or even hundreds of suppliers at the same time, including food distributors, beverage companies, laundry providers, maintenance vendors and cleaning suppliers. In many cases, orders, approvals and invoices move through disconnected systems or are handled manually by email, phone calls and spreadsheets.
Different departments frequently use separate tools that were never designed to communicate with each other, creating delays, inefficiencies and costly financial blind spots.
The problem became even more visible after the pandemic, when hotels faced rising operating costs, labor shortages and growing pressure to improve profitability while working with leaner teams.
Shimony teamed up with Shalev, a software engineer with experience at large technology companies, to build a platform that could automate major parts of the procurement and finance workflow for hotels.
Reeco connects purchasing, inventory management and accounts payable into one system that functions as a centralized operational and financial platform for hotel operators. Hotels can track inventory in real time, compare supplier pricing, automate approvals and process invoices in under 30 seconds, with general ledger coding handled automatically rather than manually.
But the company’s broader vision centers on what it calls “agentic procurement,” AI systems that actively operate on behalf of hotel teams instead of merely assisting them.
Reeco’s platform uses AI to identify price anomalies, enforce purchasing policies, process invoices automatically and catch operational issues before they affect a hotel’s margins. The goal is not only to save time, but to give hotel operators tighter control over costs and profitability at the property level.
The company says its platform is now used across more than 1,000 hotel properties operated by over 90 management companies, with growing adoption among larger hospitality groups in the United States.
Recent partnerships include hotel operators managing dozens of properties across multiple states, reflecting a broader shift as hotel companies move to modernize operational infrastructure that has historically lagged behind other industries.
That expansion has pushed Reeco to grow its American operations and leadership team as it scales deeper into the US hospitality market.
While travel technology startups have traditionally focused on booking platforms and guest-facing apps, investors are increasingly turning their attention to companies targeting hotels’ operational infrastructure, including procurement, staffing, logistics and finance.
The opportunity is large. The hospitality industry spends hundreds of billions of dollars annually on procurement and operational expenses, yet much of its infrastructure remains outdated and highly fragmented.
For large hotel groups operating across multiple properties, even small inefficiencies in purchasing, invoice processing or supplier management can create significant financial leakage at scale.
Like many Israeli startups, Reeco develops much of its technology in Israel while focusing commercially on the American market, where hotel operators are under pressure to improve efficiency without increasing headcount.
For Shimony, the mission is also personal. What began as frustration inside a family hotel business became a conviction that the next wave of competitive advantage in hospitality will not come from the lobby or the guest app, but from what happens behind the scenes.
Hotels that gain real-time control over procurement, operations and costs will have a significant advantage over those still relying on disconnected systems and month-end reporting.
Reeco is betting that AI’s next major impact on hospitality will happen not in front of the guest, but in the back office.