Reeco, an AI-driven procure-to-pay platform, has gained momentum throughout 2025. In January, the company announced that it secured $15 million in Series A funding, which would be used to fuel its growth initiatives. Reeco has also announced integrations with Vision Hospitality Group and Level5 Hospitality. LODGING recently spoke with Reeco Vice President of Business Development James Hansen, who reflected on the progress the company has made in recent months and discussed its goals for the future.
What’s new with Reeco? What are you excited about?
[Level5 Hospitality] is the most recent announcement. Just prior to that, we had all 42 hotels for Vision on our platform using our AP. There are many of those options out there for procure-to-pay, but we’re the only unique one doing AI, to go from a product-first approach. Instead of doing your typical shopping for your hotel, going to these various websites and doing single sign-on and having 20 tabs open, we’re bringing all these suppliers and their products to one marketplace. So, we create a unique marketplace for every single hotel on our platform. You no longer have to waste your time going to all these different websites, logging in to Cisco, US Food, [or] HD Supply. You don’t need to go to all these places anymore. Now, you can just go to Reeco and have all your suppliers bring all their supplies and products to one site. So, you’re in there shopping very much like an Amazon shopping experience.
We’re saving a lot of time there, a lot of effort, a lot of resources. We can save you a lot of time by buying all just through our platform. And then we’re using the AI component of it, which is to learn things like your buying habits, and to start making recommendations and pricing based on things like pricing availability, all those other parameters, these business rules that you might have with your GPO or your suppliers direct, etc. All that information and data is being pulled onto our system so that every time you’re making a purchase and putting these items into a cart, you’re maximizing your cart and your purchase, every single time, whether it’s savings, availability. So, we’re saving a lot of people’s time, which in turn saves money and dollars, and then you can redeploy your resources, your capital, your human capital, the hours, towards doing things like delighting your guests or figuring out other opportunities to drive revenue.
We also have integrations with so many great partners that allow you to use the Reeco platform, then integrate to your existing accounting. For example, M3 is one of our largest strategic partners. We have a direct integration with their accounting side. So, we talk about that AP flow, we’re pushing that invoice right into M3. It’s already coded, it’s lined up to the vendors and partners and the payment solution that they have there. So, it comes into the M3 system, already pretty much coded, ready to go, and the next step in that process would be just to post the payment there.
Integrations with all these partners are helping us consolidate and make it very streamlined, which I think is important because right now, in the hotel space, particularly, a lot of people have so many different technologies all over the place. It’s very fragmental. But if we can take the entire procurement piece, the P2P piece, and consolidate that solution under our one platform while integrating with all those great partners, it just makes it that much easier for the hotel operating system to have a grasp of, understand, and make some more effective [decisions] as operators.
Consolidating the platform sounds appealing for your partners. From your perspective, what goes into choosing which partners you align with?
A lot of times, we’re not necessarily given the choice because there are so many great partners out there that are already existing in the hotels. It comes more down to, do we need to have that integration to help our mutual customer, which is the hotel, succeed better? So, if we identify somebody, whether it’s an accounting solution or a BI, a business intelligence tool, or using Toast, for example, as a POS solution—if we discover that many of our mutual clients, the hotels, are using some of these partners, it’s in our best interests to integrate with them. Because the more data we can pull together and bring together for our mutual client, the better off they’re going to be.
They’re going to see greater results on our platform. They’re going to learn and get more visibility about, using the POS, an example, or about what people are buying at their restaurants and how they can sell more efficiently, whether it’s a better recipe or more cost-effectively. So, I think rather than identifying which ones [that we partner with], we have to understand where the need is.
As a relatively young company, what are your goals moving forward?
I’d like to say that we’re still in startup mode, but we’ve actually been at it for [five years]. And I feel like how busy we’ve become over the last six months, we’ve sort of edged beyond startup to full-on growth mode. In the short term, and let’s just call that the end of this year, I think we’re going to look to continue to grow our management company platform, purchasing some modules or all modules on our platform, deploying that in their portfolio of hotels and continue the momentum that we have already.
We have quite a few hotel management companies that have been on board already for a year, so they’re legacy users already on our platform. We have a very healthy pipeline of hotels being added at this point. And right now, if you were to sign up today, for example, we’re not actually starting onboarding until probably October, November, because we have such a robust pipeline of management companies and hotels that are currently in the various stages of the ongoing cycle.
So, we’re going to maintain that momentum, and then in 2026, the focus becomes, how do we scale that even greater? Because we’re quickly learning that it takes a few hotels within a management company to adapt and adopt some of our new technology, and once that happens, it catches on like wildfire. And the next thing you know, we have 50 to 100 hotels within that portfolio going, ‘OK, we’ve tried out Reeco, we love this piece of it. Let’s go for the whole, you know, the entire P2P process. Let’s do the purchasing, let’s do the inventory, and the rest of it.’
Another big piece of that would be, as you scale at this level, how do we continue to maintain the great level of service that we have currently? So, a lot of that is the hiring and growing of our office in Miami. We’re continually adding more support folks there. It seems like every week we’re adding a handful of people. And that momentum will just continue to the end of this year.
