Biography
Mohamed Benmansour is the co-founder and CEO of Nuitée, a startup helping companies sell hotel room inventory and travel services. Nuitée pitches itself as the “Stripe for travel”. At the end of 2024, Nuitée raised a $48M Series A.
Prior to Nuitée, Mohamed started several companies in Morocco, including ticket.ma (online ticketing platform), Binga (a fintech), and superdeal.ma (a group buying platform).
You’ve built multiple businesses before. What are you doing differently with Nuitée?
Being a global company from day 1.
Many African companies take a startup concept that works in the West and localize it to the African market. It’s an approach that works, and which I’ve replicated. With Nuitée, I shot bigger.
Nuitée’s genesis lent itself well to a global-first thesis. Some of the largest, global companies were API businesses. As industries matured, they eventually got their API winner. Digital payments got Stripe. Digital communications got Twilio. Travel, however, didn’t have its API winner.
That’s Nuitée’s positioning.
Sources: for Booking, for Expedia, for Airbnb
How did Nuitée get started?
Our core product is an API that enables companies to plug in our hotels’ room inventory. Said companies can thus offer a new service to their users (travel booking) without building it out themselves.
We started with the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. The US was saturated, and Africa was too complex. The APAC region’s hook was the presence of superapps. Superapps love APIs: that’s how they quickly offer their users more and more services. Our first customers were Chinese. We hit PMF right away. We then organically kept building products that our clients requested. We built payment gateways to help hotels avoid credit card fees. We build analytics’ dashboards.
Keep in mind this was all bootstrapped. I never set out with the intention of raising money, and we were cash-flow positive and profitable from the start.
I figured we had a special business during the pandemic, when the travel industry’s fragility became apparent. Companies in this sector, commonly known as online travel agencies (OTAs), are businesses of large balance sheets and volume. They overspend on ads. The moment volume drops, they are in big financial trouble.
Nuitée’s API product sounds simple, intuitive. Why didn’t it exist before you?