Wheelhouse spun its pricing software out of pandemic-hit Lyric Hospitality with $16M

Pricing and revenue-management software for short-term and mid-term flexible rental portfolios, described by the CEO as a fintech platform

Revenue-management software built to price Lyric's own rentals can become a standalone business serving other short and mid-stay operators

$16M co-led by Highgate Ventures and NEA with Fifth Wall, Certares, RXR, SignalFire and PAR Capital; Lyric had raised nearly $180M in debt and equity

Lyric Hospitality, a San Francisco short-term-rental company, designed and managed inventory and built its own dynamic pricing software, Wheelhouse Pro. CEO Andrew Kitchell says it was heading into March 2020 with record revenue before cancellations drove occupancy to 8-10%.

In mid-2020 Lyric cut headcount from 150 to 15 and shut most locations. The remaining team focused on its technology, launching Wheelhouse Pro for large portfolios in February 2021, about 10 months after the shutdown. Kitchell said the operating company could not survive as an OpCo but the software was worth keeping. In April 2022 Wheelhouse formally spun out of Lyric with a $16M round.

Occupancy collapsed during the pandemic, making an operating company with urban corporate exposure unviable

Lyric already owned dynamic-pricing software and a core team willing to keep building it

Remote work created demand for longer, mid-length rentals, widening the market for pricing tools

Kitchell kept the asset the pandemic could not kill, software its own operators had used, and sold it to the competitors who had also lost their business models.

As of April 2022 Wheelhouse was a standalone software company with $16M in new funding, with majority B2B revenue and plans to extend its pricing engine worldwide.