Airbnb leads a $58M Series C in WeRoad and hires its CEO to run hotels

The Milan group-travel platform takes a $58M Series C and a strategic 10% Airbnb shareholding. Andrea D’Amico leaves to run Airbnb’s hotels division.

Airbnb has led a $58m Series C in WeRoad, the Milan-based group-adventure-travel platform, taking a 10% stake and a board seat as part of the deal. Andrea D’Amico, the company’s chief executive since 2022, is simultaneously leaving

WeRoad to lead Airbnb’s hotels division. The funding round was reported on Wednesday by TechCrunch and Skift.

The structure is unusual for an Airbnb investment and worth dwelling on. The platform giant has historically grown its Experiences and tours business organically rather than through equity stakes in specialist operators.

Backing WeRoad and hiring its CEO simultaneously is a tighter form of integration that gets Airbnb both a minority position in the group-tour category and a senior operator with two decades of Booking.com EMEA hotel experience to run its own hotels push. D’Amico, before joining WeRoad in 2022, spent 18 years at Booking.com running large parts of its hotel business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

For WeRoad itself, the round closes one of the more visibly successful trajectories in European travel tech. The company runs multi-day organised tours, with a curated pool of tour guides, aimed primarily at the millennial-and-younger group-travel category that traditional tour operators have struggled to serve.

WeRoad raised a €18m Series B in late 2023 and has compounded steadily since; the new $58m brings total funding to roughly $85-90m, with the Series C explicitly earmarked for US expansion.

The US market is the harder of the two parts of WeRoad’s plan. The European group-adventure-travel category has been growing on the back of millennial willingness to pay for structured social travel; the US analogue exists, but with stronger incumbents including Intrepid, G Adventures and the white-label tour layers inside Expedia and the Airbnb Experiences network itself.

WeRoad’s pitch is that the proprietary tour-guide platform and the brand it has built on Instagram and TikTok carries over; the US operating reality, particularly customer acquisition costs, is the test.

The Airbnb side of the deal is the more strategically interesting layer. The platform has been visibly trying to broaden out from short-term rentals for years, with mixed success on the Experiences side and a much harder slog on the longer-term hotel-equivalent category.

Hiring an operator with serious Booking.com hotel pedigree, and pairing that with a minority position in a fast-growing group-travel platform, signals that Airbnb is now prepared to deploy real balance-sheet capital to accelerate that move rather than relying on product-team growth experiments.

The valuation implied by Airbnb’s 10% stake for $58m is around $580m post-money, a roughly 4-5x mark-up from WeRoad’s Series B valuation in late 2023 (estimated at around $120-150m at the time). That is a strong but not extraordinary step-up for a profitable, growing European travel-tech company in the current funding environment.

WeRoad’s new chief executive has not been publicly named. The board search is reportedly under way, with an internal candidate expected to take the role on an interim basis. The Series C is expected to fund 18 months of US launch operations.