CellPoint has secured USD 34 million from Toscafund, via Penta Capital, and has launched Zenith, an AI decisioning platform for airlines and hotels.
The funding comes alongside a leadership change and the launch of Zenith, a platform built for airline and hospitality payments. The changes are intended to restructure CellPoint around an AI-led payments proposition in the company's two core markets.
How Zenith works
Zenith is an AI decisioning layer that sits above a payment orchestrator, either CellPoint's own or one supplied by a third party. It uses payment data to automate commercial decisions, enabling airlines and hotels to deploy it without replacing their existing payment stack.
According to the company, the platform is intended to do four things: raise approval rates, lower the cost of payments, recover lost revenue, and give chief financial officers a live view of how their payment infrastructure performs.
Because Zenith is not tied to CellPoint's own orchestration product, its potential users include merchants that run third-party orchestrators, not only CellPoint's existing clients. In addition, the launch also marks an extension of the company's offering beyond orchestration into a separate data and decisioning layer.
The new leadership's brief centres on airlines and hospitality. The company describes these as sectors in which payments directly shape margin, revenue, and resilience.
Kevin Murphy, Group CEO, described payments as one of the main controllable costs and revenue lines in an airline or hotel profit and loss account. He added that it is frequently one of the least well-managed. He said the investment allows CellPoint to build Zenith at pace. In a further statement, the company said the leadership has been given a mandate with three parts: focus on the business, invest in AI, and deliver measurable financial impact for airline and hospitality customers. Zenith is positioned as the main vehicle for that plan.
Investment and hiring plans
Beyond product development, the Toscafund investment will fund 50 new roles across product, data, AI, sales, and partnerships in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
Steven Scott, Managing Partner at Penta Capital, said the firm backed both the team and its plan. He pointed to the leadership's experience in transforming the business and in turning AI into measurable financial results for airlines and hotels. He described Zenith as a distinct position in a category of commercial significance and said the size of the investment reflects the firm's confidence in the expected outcome.
For airline and hospitality merchants, the combination of fresh capital and a platform that works independently of the orchestrator points to a narrower strategic focus for CellPoint. The company is now concentrating on payment performance as a financial lever in these two sectors rather than on infrastructure alone.
