Trybe raises £23m to modernise spa operations with embedded payments and AI
This article covers Trybe, a SaaS startup, which has raised £23m in a series A funding round led by Five Elms Capital to accelerate its all-in-one platform for spa, bathhouse, leisure and activity management. The funding aims to support Trybe's expansion across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, deepen payments and embedded finance capabilities and add AI-assisted scheduling, forecasting and guest personalisation to serve spa and leisure operators.
Trybe has raised £23 million in a series A funding round led by Five Elms Capital to accelerate its all-in-one platform for spa, bathhouse, leisure and activity management. The funding will be used to expand geographically across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, deepen payments and embedded finance capabilities, and add AI-assisted features to scheduling, forecasting and guest personalisation.
Why it matters
The spa and leisure sector remains fragmented when it comes to operational technology. Operators juggling reservations, memberships, point-of-sale and payments often run a mix of legacy systems and manual processes that limit revenue opportunities and complicate guest experience. Trybe says it now supports hundreds of spa and leisure operations worldwide, from single-location venues to multi-site resort groups and hotel operators, and this capital round aims to scale that footprint.
For investors and operators, the deal highlights appetite for vertical SaaS that tackles hospitality and wellness workflows end to end — covering bookings, payments, membership management and reporting in a single platform.
Inside the product
Trybe positions itself as an operating system for spas and related leisure venues. Key product areas highlighted in the announcement include:
- bookings and spa package management, with an emphasis on configurable workflows for different venue types
- membership and reporting functionality to track recurring revenue and customer behaviour
- payments and embedded financial products, including plans to improve settlement flexibility and card-present capabilities
- AI-assisted features for yield management, scheduling and guest personalisation, which Trybe says will help recover revenue lost to manual inefficiencies
The company plans to expand its go-to-market organisation and customer success teams to support growth as it rolls these features out across new markets.
Who are the investors?
Five Elms Capital led the round, with the announcement naming the firm as the strategic backer supporting Trybe’s global expansion and product roadmap. No other participants were disclosed in the materials provided.
In the announcement, Ryan Mandl, Partner at Five Elms Capital, said:
rybe stands out as the clear modern alternative in a market long constrained by rigid, outdated systems. The Trybe team has built a configurable, intuitive platform that customers genuinely love, and their traction across geographies and spa and leisure segments reflects that. We’re thrilled to support Trybe as they scale globally, deepen their payments capabilities, and continue building a category-defining product.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Ricky Daniels, Co-founder at Trybe, said:
Spa and leisure operators are facing increasingly complex operations, payments, and guest-experience challenges. Legacy systems simply haven’t kept up. We built Trybe to give operators a flexible, modern operating system that maximizes revenue, reduces friction, and unlocks exceptional guest experiences. As we look ahead, we see meaningful opportunities to introduce AI-assisted scheduling, forecasting, and personalisation into the platform, capabilities that will further streamline operations and capture revenue previously lost to manual inefficiencies. Partnering with Five Elms allows us to accelerate this roadmap and deliver even more value to our customers.
Daniels’ comments underline the product-led rationale for the round: fewer integrations and more embedded capabilities, especially in payments and AI, are positioned as the levers for faster adoption by larger operators.
The bigger picture
Trybe’s raise sits within a broader trend of investor interest in vertical SaaS solutions for hospitality and wellness. The move to add embedded finance and card-present functionality reflects a common playbook: own more of the payments stack to increase monetisation and customer stickiness. For the UK and European ecosystem, the deal is another data point showing that locally founded product teams can attract international growth capital to scale globally from the region.
As hospitality operations continue to digitalise, expect more investment into specialist platforms that bridge reservations, operations and payments — and more competition to provide AI-driven tools that aim to reduce manual overhead across venues.
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