When Hostaway crossed the $1 billion valuation mark, it became the first short-term rental PMS to reach unicorn status. For CEO Marcus Rader, the milestone still feels surreal.
“I was always telling people we’re going to be the first unicorn,” he said. “People in the industry know that I joke around a lot that I’m not so serious, but then we received a valuation report and noticed, hey, this is probably newsworthy, and we made it. It’s a major recognition of all the hard work that the team has been doing. And that’s ten years in the making.”
From “New Kid on the Block” to Market Leader
Rader points out that many of Hostaway’s competitors were already big when the company started in 2015.
“The companies that are big today, they were big ten years ago when we started,” he said. “We were the new kid on the block, and now we managed to just do things differently, do more efficiently, and that’s really helped us grow.”
That difference began with an international mindset. Hostaway was built as a remote-first company with one founder in North America and another in Europe — a structure that allowed it to balance global markets early on.
“Before COVID, we had 40% of the customers in Europe and 40% in North America,” Rader recalled. “During COVID, as the European market went through a lot of struggles, we focused fully on the U.S., and we managed to become market leaders there. That’s quite remarkable for a European software company to become the market leader in the U.S.”
Today, that balance is shifting again.
“We realized that the biggest growth opportunity in the future is our home here in Europe,” Rader said. “So I decided to move back with my family here. We now live in Warsaw in Poland. It’s a great base because it’s so central. I can fly anywhere and be in Barcelona or in Rome or in Malta.”
For Rader, leadership means showing up.
“If I say, focus on Europe, I can’t sit in North America or somewhere on a beach and say, ‘Why don’t you focus on Europe?’ No, I need to come here, and I need to be here at the trade show.”
A CEO Who Keeps Learning
Despite the unicorn label, Rader still spends time at industry events like the Vacation Rental World Summit.
“We want to learn because when we started, we knew nothing about this industry ten years ago,” he said. “There’s challenges that I’ve heard before, but there’s also new challenges that I haven’t. I love hearing those stories, that especially here you get to sit around the table, talk intimately to a random group of people.”
He believes the vacation rental landscape is again on the verge of transformation—this time driven by large language models (LLMs).
“What we haven’t seen yet, I’m really excited about this part, is how social media changed travel, but only to some parts,” Rader said. “Now, LLMs will change this whole thing dramatically.”
He predicts that AI tools will soon shape how travelers discover both destinations and accommodation options.
“If people can search for their dream vacation, and that happens to be in a vacation home, then maybe the LLMs can tell them, ‘By the way, if you don’t want to pay a lot of money for Airbnb, you can get the same property directly here.’”
And just as importantly, he believes LLMs will influence where people travel:
“A certain percentage will start asking LLMs, ‘Okay, I’m tired of all of this, I don’t want to feel like cattle as a tourist, I want a genuine experience—where do I go?’ And probably an LLM will ask, ‘Have you ever been to Albania? Have you ever been to northern Sweden?’”
Building for What Comes Next
While few property managers are thinking about AI yet, Rader believes that will soon change.
“I haven’t heard a single property manager who is worried about how their business is going to be impacted by LLMs,” he said. “They don’t see it yet. I think in two years when we are here, everyone will be talking about it. But by then, it’s too late.”
As he puts it:
“My job is to think about what are the problems in two years from now, and how do we solve them now so that our customers can succeed.”
This long-term thinking also connects to Hostaway’s company culture.
“One of our values at Hostaway is empowerment and ownership,” Rader said. “We don’t micromanage. When we have a project, we give full ownership. People work on their own, and they come up with the results. It’s been working well for us.”
Investing in Product, Engineering, and Larger Accounts
Asked what comes next with this new wave of funding, Rader said Hostaway is expanding its product and engineering teams and investing heavily in core European markets.
“The last two years, we have invested more and more money into some core European markets,” he said. “Specifically, the UK, where we’re already the market leader, but also France, Spain, and Italy. And we are growing the teams here. Also Portugal.”
Hostaway is also seeing rapid growth among larger customers.
“There’s a lot of large property managers that are looking for a new PMS,” Rader said. “When I say large, I mean those that have between 200 and 5,000 properties. That segment is something that we see a lot more opportunity in.”
“What You Do Every Day”
Reflecting on a decade of building Hostaway, Rader draws a parallel between building a company and running a long race: breakthroughs matter, but what defines success is consistency.
“You’re going to have a big breakthrough, but in the end that’s not so important,” he said. “What’s more important is what you do every day—the little things.”
Takeaway
Hostaway’s unicorn milestone isn’t just about valuation—it’s about validation.
It highlights how far the short-term rental tech ecosystem has come, and how much further it can go. With expansion across Europe, a focus on large-scale property managers, and an early eye on AI-driven discovery, Marcus Rader and his team seem intent on keeping Hostaway one step ahead of what’s next.
Thibault Masson is a leading expert in vacation rental revenue management and dynamic pricing strategies. As Head of Product Marketing at PriceLabs and founder of Rental Scale-Up, Thibault empowers hosts and property managers with actionable insights and data-driven solutions. With over a decade managing luxury rentals in Bali and St. Barths, he is a sought-after industry speaker and prolific content creator, making complex topics simple for global audiences.
