Predictive Analytics Expert Jeff Ma Joins Duetto

With the increasing importance of analytics to hoteliers today, Duetto has doubled down on its commitment to innovation by hiring Jeff Ma as Senior Vice President of Product and Analytics.

Ma joins Duetto, hospitality's only Revenue Strategy Platform, after serving as Vice President of Data Science and Analytics at Twitter, where he led the central data science, machine learning and analytics teams. Prior, Ma gained notoriety as the leader of the MIT blackjack team and was the inspiration for the best-selling book "Bringing Down the House" and hit film "21."

Ma served for two years as ESPN's first Predictive Analytics Expert and has founded several successful technology companies, including a sports media and analytics startup Citizen Sports, acquired by Yahoo, and a human capital analytics company called tenXer, which was acquired by Twitter in 2015.

"For my next chapter, I was looking for a business where analytics were at the foundation of the company's value proposition, and I couldn't have found a better fit with Duetto," Ma said. "The opportunity to apply the 'Moneyball' playbook to the hospitality vertical unlocks huge potential for hotels to excel in areas where they have previously struggled. By leveraging data and analytics, Duetto will revolutionize how hotels achieve greater profitability and personalization and market directly to consumers."

Duetto's Revenue Strategy Platform brings together core technologies and data to make them accessible through multi-tenant cloud architecture. With integrations to more than 50 technology partners, the platform serves as a foundation for hotel companies to execute the holistic Revenue Strategy championed by Duetto since its launch more than six years ago. By unifying teams around a common source of dynamic data and a company-wide mission focused on profitability, an organization can become more efficient, drive more direct engagement with customers and capture more revenue.

"Jeff will bring our product team to the next level by matching the best in Silicon Valley with the best vision in hospitality," said Marco Benvenuti, Co-founder and Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, Duetto. "As the pace of change has accelerated and the threats of digital disruption have grown, so have our efforts to help this industry we're so passionate about. Analytics are at the core of what we do, and I'm excited to see Jeff build out a world-class team of data scientists and help shape the industry's only Revenue Strategy Platform."

In February of 2018, Duetto announced an $80 million Series D financing round led by Warburg Pincus, a leading global private-equity firm focused on growth investing. The company's flagship software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, GameChanger, brought machine learning, new consumer-centric data and the breakthrough innovation of Open Pricing to the industry, enabling hotel companies to independently price all distribution channels, customer segments, room types and stay dates in real time.