How Montreal Became the Second Most Important Travel Tech Hub

When Montreal-based Stay22 announced a $122 million growth investment from Summit Partners in February, most of the coverage treated it as a standalone story: another affiliate monetization platform raising money. But the real story isn’t the company — Stay22 is the latest in a pattern that has been hiding in plain sight for over a decade. 

Montreal has quietly become the second most important city in the world for travel tech infrastructure, after the San Francisco Bay Area. And unlike Silicon Valley, which builds consumer brands, Montreal builds the plumbing of travel that the entire global travel industry runs on: the ancillary revenue engines, the payment rails, the virtual interlining algorithms, the compliance APIs, the affiliate routing systems, and more.

The combined enterprise value of travel tech companies built in this city now exceeds $15 billion, according to our estimates. Nobody has told that story because nobody has connected the dots. S