Mews cuts 200 jobs as Richard Valtr preps for the AI era

Mews founder Richard Valtr has announced the layoff of around 200 employees — 15% of the team — at the most valuable startup with Czech roots, even as the company posts record growth and, after its January funding round, is valued at more than 50 billion crowns.

Valtr, who studied philosophy in London but chose business because of his family's hotel trade, founded Mews in 2012. Since then, the hotel software company has grown into the country's most valuable tech startup: in January it closed another funding round worth more than 6 billion crowns, pushing its valuation to $2.5 billion.

Despite this, management decided to act pre-emptively. “Today we had to make the difficult decision to part ways with several members of our team. These are people who poured enormous energy into making Mews what it is today,” Valtr wrote on LinkedIn, without disclosing the exact number of cuts.

The company later confirmed to Skift and CzechCrunch that the cuts affect roughly 200 of its 1,350 employees — 15% of staff. The layoffs will touch positions across all teams and geographies at the remote-first company, whose largest office is in Prague, alongside hubs in Amsterdam, London, Bruges and New York. According to Chief Product and Technology Officer Josef Starýchfojtů, however, customer-facing roles will be largely untouched by the cuts.

“The business continues to grow very fast, the product is better than ever, and the ambition to become the most influential operating system for the hospitality industry has never been closer,” Valtr said, commenting on management's latest move. According to him, the company could not ignore the shifting market: guest expectations are rising, the pace of innovation is relentless, and artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping the economics of the hospitality industry.

“That's exactly why we wanted to act now, before the environment around us — and the company we built for it — changed irreversibly,” the Mews founder explained. “The right time for structural transformation is when you're in a position of strength, not when you're forced into it,” Starýchfojtů added.

Mews is not the only Czech tech company to announce mass layoffs amid the rise of AI in recent months. Similar moves have been made by Productboard (which cut more than 30% of its team), Ataccama, the Direct group (more than 350 people), Brno-based Kiwi.com (a third of staff), Heureka, and 3D-printer maker Prusa Research, which laid off around 70 people for the first time in its history.