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Raus, a platform offering cabins for nature-based stays, has landed more than €8.5 million in fresh funding.
The round was led by European travel technology venture business Roch Ventures with Rockaway Ventures, Dupuis Investment and existing investors.
As it looks to scale the brand, Raus has also secured an asset-backed lending facility from Germany’s Varengold Bank as part of the round.
Germany-based Raus offers cabin accommodation in nature settings near German cities, including Berlin and Dresden. The investment will go towards expansion across Europe with a launch in Austria planned soon.
Alongside expansion, Raus is also launching a new cabin model with improved construction and facilities. The company is also looking to further develop its proprietary technology and bring additional “immersive nature” products and services to the platform.
In comments via email to PhocusWire, Julian Trautwein, co-founder and CEO of Raus, said, “Our biggest focus has been the implementation of a new digital guest journey with a fully in-house built booking engine as well as guest facing travel concierge designed to our own standards, ensuring an individual experience for each guest – e.g. offering them additional extras and services catered to their needs, or extended stays if available for their cabin and date. On the partner side, we have been developing and improving our dashboards for our landowners and local providers: from tracking the delivery of food packages in real time to onboarding local service providers such as cleaners fully digitally. Furthermore, we have equipped our cabins with next generation technology such as an improved sensory suite and smart tech stack and have reduced the energy consumption.”
Raus launched in late 2021 and currently has more than 50 cabins across Germany. The company also opened its first nature resort Lodge am See, between Berlin and Hamburg, in recent months.
Ludger Kübel-Sorger, founder and managing partner of Roch Ventures, said, “We are pleased to partner with Raus. Raus has all the ingredients of a future winner: a premium value proposition targeting the high-growth segment of nature immersion; the use of digital technologies for true sustainability and rapid scaling; and an outstanding founding team.”
Raus said it has grown revenue more than 500% in the past year as well as increased the number of guests fivefold year over year. Trautwein added that the company is “still at the very beginning of our journey.”
“With Raus, we want to make nature seamlessly accessible. Booking a stay in a beautiful remote place and spending time should be as easy as booking a hotel room. Our vision is to become the go-to platform for nature immersion and the category leader in nature hospitality with services and products far beyond the actual stay. This year, we have expanded with new locations close to Frankfurt am Main and Stuttgart, which have been nearly at full occupancy since.”
Commenting on potential challenges to growth, Trautwein said, “The complexity involved in our business model is high and much more complex than running a hotel with 200 keys in the city, especially with our high approach to quality and sustainability. We have many rooms, and they are all in different, usually very remote locations, mostly without any access to infrastructure. So we are faced with many logistical challenges and operational processes to ensure that our guests have a remarkable experience at every stay. At the same time, we are working hard to scale our cabin production to keep up with the ever growing demand from our guests – which is of course a very fortunate challenge. There are plenty of components to tackle but if we manage those, there are no limits to growth.”
Total funding for Raus to date is more than €14.5 million in equity and debt with investors including the founders of Airbnb and micromobility company Tier.
This is the third investment for Roch Ventures following its recent investment in Spain-based Apartool and its investment in WeSki earlier this year. The company is focused on travel technology startups in Europe and plans to make up to 15 investments.
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