“I always remember being 14 years old on my summer holidays, thinking that this was so unfair,” the Mews founder told Fortune at his company’s Unfold conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday. “My hatred went for the systems.”

While his friends were enjoying their summers, a teenage Valtr was working the graveyard shift at his family’s boutique hotel in Prague, hunched over credit card slips at 1 a.m., matching every payment to every guest bill as part of the industry’s dreaded “night audit.” The ritual took roughly two hours, and it had to be done every single night.

That dreaded nightly task became the impetus for Valtr to build Mews, a hotel and hospitality management software that’s used by over 15,000 properties worldwide. Valtr said he created Mews, which acts as a catch-all system for hoteliers to handle bookings, check-ins, payments, and operations, simply because he believed there had to be a better way that manually checking slips. “I kind of channeled all my energy towards the actual tasks,” he says, “because I was like, this is so stupid.”

Night receptionist to unicorn

The idea came in 2012, when Valtr first tried to modernize the industry while getting firsthand experience from his family property, the Emblem Hotel, in the center of Prague. It was there that he learned property management systems looked and felt like they’d been designed in the 1990s, and that’s because they had been. When Valtr went shopping for something better, he found nothing. “I just thought, ‘Screw it, how hard can it be to build it myself?’” And along with fellow ex-hotelier CEO Matthijs Welle, who joined Valtr in 2013, the two grew Mews slowly—and then rapidly—across Europe and the U.S.

In January 2026, Mews raised $300 million in a Series D round, bringing the company’s valuation to $2.5 billion and cementing its status as a unicorn and one of the most valuable hospitality technology companies in the world. It was the capstone of a fundraising trajectory that has now totaled $710 million across 14 rounds, including a $75 million raise led by Tiger Global in 2025 and a €101 million round the year prior.

“There’s a reason why we have a following, there’s a reason why we have a community,” Valtr said. “The strength of Mews is its community and the people who feel really passionate about what it is that we’re doing.”

Valtr credits that expansive growth with the sheer fact that Mews is built by people inside the industry. “One of the biggest problems of this industry,” Valtr explained, “is that the people that build the systems, they’re all people that have never worked at that reception desk.”

Legacy system specs tend to be driven from the top, he said, from a head of finance, general manager or franchise owner, the people who want control instead of thinking about the 14-year-old working the nightshift. Valtr said that somebody who’s “relatively highly powered” in a hotel will often demand on certain specifications, “but they’re not built from people who actually do the jobs. They’re people who just want to have control over everything.”

“They might be thinking about how to make more money, but they’re not thinking about it from the perspective of: how do I get these people who are working in my hotel to make me more money?”

Valtr brings up an example of the front desk manager, tasked with checking in guests, ensuring rooms are ready, getting up to speed on a guest’s arrival time and whether they need to secure transportation while they’re in the area. Valtr dismissed most competing systems, saying they’re focused on decreasing record-keeping and logistics instead of helping create more authentic guest experiences and interactions.

“We try and always think about that,” he said, referring to the corporate practice of “dogfooding,” or when a company uses its own product before it releases the service to their clients. “How do we dogfood ourselves, so the thing that we’re preaching, we’re doing the same ourselves as well?”

That framework won Mews the Best PMS (point management system) by Hotel Tech Report for the last three years running, and, as Valtr said, is why “all the systems now look like us.”

The company powers roughly 15,000 hotel customers across 85 countries, processes nearly $20 billion in annual transactions, and has logged over 42 million guest check-ins. Its SaaS gross profit grew 55% in the year leading up to the Series D. And Valtr, who still describes himself as a “frustrated hotelier,” says the mission hasn’t changed since he was 14 and furious at 1 a.m. in Prague.

“We want to make sure that fundamentally all of our hotels feel that they’re the most profitable.”

Archer Aviation (ACHR +2.12%) is in the business of making flying cars — or rather, flying shuttles — to help people avoid traffic jams in major cities and save a serious amount of time.

Picture a small electric aircraft lifting straight up from a rooftop and flying to your destination in 10 minutes or less. That’s Archer’s vision. It’s not as thrilling as a Disney theme park ride, but it could feel as satisfying as skipping a three-hour line in the Lightning Lane.

Speaking of Disney — or rather, magic — Archer’s vision has the makings of a great story, yet outside the imagination, very little of its business has taken off. Mostly pre-revenue, without FAA certification in hand, the only thing keeping Archer afloat is the patent for its Midnight aircraft — a four-seater (five with pilot) that will hopefully zip above cities en route to airports and major urban ports.

Well, we can hope that day will come. And if it does, this sub-$7 stock could undergo a radical transformation.

Image source: Archer Aviation.

Chasing certification

The first thing to know about Archer Aviation, other than its traffic-ending vision of flying cars, is the progress it’s making on the FAA certification timeline.

Earlier in May, Archer became the first eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) company to complete phase three of the FAA’s four-step certification process. That was good news for toe-tapping investors waiting for some progress on the regulatory front, and it allows Archer to physically test its aircraft under FAA oversight to prove its airworthiness.

Elsewhere, Archer is making significant progress toward bringing eVTOLs to a major city near you. Under the White House’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, Archer is working with partners in three of the biggest U.S. states (New York, Texas, and Florida) to initiate operations there in the “second half” of 2026. That seems ambitious — the second half of 2026 officially begins in five weeks — but with the White House’s urgent push for eVTOL commercialization, who knows: You might see a Midnight aircraft in a sky near you.

Icarus flying close to the sun?

A sub-$7 price may make Archer seem cheap, but in business terms, it’s not a bargain. At around $7 a share, Archer still has a market cap of about $5 billion, while first-quarter revenue was only $1.6 million, and its net loss was roughly $218 million.

Archer burns roughly $180 million a quarter, while having about $1.8 billion in liquidity. If Archer were to continue burning cash at this rate, three years would pass before it needed a fresh cash injection.

The problem is Archer’s annual cash burn. In 2024, it burned about $450 million; in 2025, it blew through $538 million; and over the last 12 months, it’s spent $615 million.

Where’s all that money going? On certification work and manufacturing, most likely. To date, Archer has finished only two aircraft, and its next three have been in production since last August. If it finishes those before its next earnings report in August, that will give it a fleet of five — a far cry from the 500 eVTOLs the company once promised it would have in 2026.

At this point, Archer needs a network of air taxis, the infrastructure to support it, a team of pilots and specialists to run the program, and marketing and advertising to build up a customer base. When you factor in these future expenses, that $1.8 billion in liquidity could evaporate fast — and Archer doesn’t have meaningful revenue to soak up the costs itself.

Will buying Archer under $7 make investors rich?

At this point, Archer is an eVTOL hopeful whose only major asset is a patent for Midnight. It has partners in manufacturing and technology — including Stellantis, which is itself undergoing a massive structural change in its business — and a potential customer in United Airlines. But I would hesitate to call Archer a strong buy right now for most investors, or even a modest one.

Archer, in a nutshell, is benefiting from a larger milieu driving the stock market today, an atmosphere of hope and speculation, of narratives and techno-optimism, that can see past the hard, concrete reality of today to a future of maybes and could-bes. Archer could be a major industrial stock in 10 or 20 years; it could be a traveler’s best friend or a major defense partner like Palantir; it could, in short, make early investors very rich.

But today, it is a $7 stock with clipped wings, no commercial revenue from its eVTOLs, and a vision with more unknowns than constants. Those who jump on board should size their positions carefully, as this one could be flying a little too close to the sun.