🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week: Jurny

✍️ Notes from the Editors

Welcome back to another special edition of Unicorner. Today, we’re revisiting a company that we already had the privilege of covering back in early 2022. Not just that, we’re providing exclusive coverage of the company’s most recent fundraise ahead of its public community round.

That company is Jurny.

Jurny has come a long way since we last covered it. You might recall that we were impressed by Jurny’s approach to hospitality, with its inventive ideas on building an automated, consistent approach to booking a stay. Now, the company’s core offering is bringing this same approach to many more people.

But, there’s more. Today’s cover comes with a unique opportunity: as of today, you can directly invest as little as $250 into Jurny. Check it out on its Wefunder page.

Note: we’ve been compensated for bringing you this deep dive. Regardless, we believe in Jurny’s mission like any other potential unicorn-to-be that we share with you. Read the full disclosure on our website.

- Arek and Ethan 🦄

Hospitality powered by AI

Jurny is an all-in-one platform designed to handle every aspect of property management from booking to checkout. With its centralized dashboard, hosts can manage properties with ease and minimize or eliminate the need for manual intervention in tasks like review management and guest support. Its AI-powered assistant Nia provides 24/7 responses to guest queries, assisting hosts with often time-consuming guest communication. All in all, Jurny's handling of complex and time-consuming tasks enables hosts to deliver high-quality guest experiences while growing their businesses.

🔗 Check it out: jurny.com

💰 Business Model

The company offers its service through a freemium SaaS model. The entry-level tier, available for free, includes its property management system, single-click Airbnb connection, a guest mobile app, and its Nia AI. Its Plus tier starts at $29 per unit per month, and includes all of these as well as a website booking engine, channel manager, and IoT hub. The $69 per unit per month Pro plan adds dynamic pricing and guest screening, among more, to the list of features. Customers can contact the company to learn more about its Pro+ and Enterprise plans.

📈 Traction and Fundraising

• Raised $5.5 million seed round from top VCs including Mucker Capital, Okapi VC, Vitalize VC, Singularity Capital, and SaaS VC

• Over 2,000 properties on the platform, with nearly 40,000 usages per month

• Following the launch of its AI tools early this year, Jurny’s usage is growing 200% month over month

👫 Founders

• Luca Zambello, CEO: Previously Co-Founder @ Zainge, President @ Luca&Luca Promotions

📖 Founder Story

Luca grew up in Mantua, Italy, and moved to the U.S. at 21 to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams. His first endeavor led him to real estate management and quickly grew into a business spanning 300 units across five cities. Luca quickly realized the limitations of existing software and the fragmented nature of the industry. This sparked his vision to create a fully automated management solution, leveraging AI to streamline operational tasks. Luca and his business partner decided to raise venture capital to fuel the vision and went to market with Jurny in 2019.

💼 Opportunities

Reply to this email with your resume if interested, and we’ll make an intro. 🚀

• Customer Success Manager (CSM)

• Demand Generation Marketer

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🔮 Our Analysis

When we covered Jurny in March of 2022, the company was still fairly early. It was only when we met CEO Luca Zambello in person at our 2022 LA Tech Week panel that we understood the full scope of what he and his team were building.

“Hospitality management is broken and severely fragmented, resulting in billions of dollars wasted each year in operational inefficiencies," Luca describes to us today. "We created Jurny as the solution."

To address this, Jurny OS is built with all sides of the hospitality market in mind. A property owner has a single, streamlined dashboard to manage everything having to do with renting and managing properties. Booking services like Airbnb, Expedia, and Booking are seamless integrations, and guests have access to an on-demand support chat and customization features.

In the past year, the company has rapidly expanded its platform’s list of features, allowing it to get closer to its dream of being a vertically integrated one-stop solution. For example, the company recently launched its property management system for free. Offering this product for free is an industry first, and is made possible by Jurny’s fully automated self-onboarding.

Moreover, this offering has enabled the company to reach a new audience segment. As Sr. Director of BizDev Jason Lopez at Jurny explains, the company is now able to reach an underserved community by providing its software to customers that would otherwise look toward more costly solutions for their automation needs.

Jurny has now been focusing on building automation tools for smaller tasks: rebookings, basic questions, and IoT actions. During a time when many companies are attempting to capitalize on the hype of AI with quick offerings and ChatGPT wrappers, Jurny is gaining traction with its AI feature that fits well within its core goal of delivering automation. The company has displayed an extraordinary ability to stay ahead of the technology curve while demonstrating its services are more than a fad.

If you’re as bullish on Jurny as we are, you can also invest in them as of today. Check out the public round here.

📚 Further Reading

• Commercial Real Estate Firms Seeing Higher Profits and Lower Expenses Possible with ChatGPT and other Generative AI Tools [Benzinga]

• Jurny Experiences Unprecedented Growth Leveraging RAD AI for Creative Intelligence [Bloomberg]

Written by the editors

🎙️ Founder Q&A

Unicorner: What's next for the company, and how does this fit into its overall vision of where it wants to be in the next five years?

Luca: Our long-term vision for Jurny is to further establish Jurny as a leader in AI and Automation for hospitality, all while remaining focused on streamlining the entire process of property management and user experience.

Unicorner: What made you pivot to AI?

Luca: Any business that is not putting series energy and focus into AI today is destined to be left behind. We believe the next wave of unicorns will be companies that can expertly adopt and train Language Models like OpenAI to address specific industry problems within their existing infrastructure. While tech giants will commoditize LLMs, companies that focus on specific verticals and construct proprietary infrastructures will prosper. This is our strategy at Jurny. We've solved the pervasive issue of technology fragmentation in the hospitality industry by consolidating several complex technologies under a unified platform. We've then trained our AI to use our platform to assist hospitality companies with their day-to-day operations. This includes supporting guests with precise information, managing reservations, verifying guests, escalating tasks to supervisors, and handling other daily tasks like review management and tech support. Tasks that an LLM would not be able to handle if not properly trained and given the right infrastructure to do so. Too many businesses are still not paying attention to AI and it will be a fatal mistake for many of them.

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