Evan
Chen

Imagine you're standing at a hotel front desk at 11pm, calling down to ask when checkout is. The phone rings. And rings. No one picks up. Evan Chen had that experience enough times - and from the other side too, managing teams at Facebook - to know exactly what was broken.

In 2018, Chen left Meta after four years as a Solutions Engineering Manager and co-founded Akia with a team of ex-Facebook engineers. The pitch wasn't "we'll make hotel texting better." It was bigger: he wanted to build an AI that acted like a hotel team member - one that learns individual guest habits, anticipates requests, and handles the routine so human staff can focus on the exceptional.

The company launched commercially in 2019. Then COVID hit. Chen steered Akia through the worst hospitality crisis in living memory not by retreating but by doubling down. Contactless check-in, digital guidebooks, automated communications - everything the pandemic made urgent, Akia had already built. The company came out the other side with real clients, a seed round from GSR Ventures, and proof that the model worked under pressure.

By 2023, Altos Ventures led a $6M Series A. By September 2024, another $5M came in - this time at a $44.9M valuation. But the headline numbers miss the granular reality Chen obsesses over: at properties running Akia, 72% of guests communicate by text rather than phone. Of those, 84% complete check-in that way. One property saw its positive online reviews jump 142%. A 500-room hotel, Chen calculated, can free up roughly 200 hours of staff time per month.

That precision - chasing the measurable outcome rather than the impressive deck - tracks with how Chen runs his team internally. He doesn't buy the "hire unicorns and rockstars" thesis that floats through the tech industry. "Average teams can achieve exceptional results through strong management," he's written. He tracks manager effectiveness, employee satisfaction scores, and revenue per meeting as concrete metrics. His reference point is leadership thinker Leif Babin: "The leader drives performance - or doesn't."

Before Akia, Chen's path zigzagged through multiple founding experiments. At Central Desktop, a collaboration software company, he worked as a Senior Software Engineer. He founded Midas Academy, a mentorship program for young entrepreneurs. He built Kite, a free student progress tracking app for teachers. Each venture fed something into the next: an instinct for systems, a bias toward service, and a habit of building for people who didn't have time for complexity.

His long-range bet is straightforward: text messaging in hotels will become what WiFi is now - infrastructure so expected it's invisible. Akia is already positioned in that exact direction, expanding from messaging into a full marketing suite for hotels and vacation rentals, adding AI agents, digital check-in, cashless tipping, smart upsells, and reputation management into one unified platform. Chen's word for the goal is "invisible hospitality" - the guest experience that works seamlessly because the technology behind it has done its job and gotten out of the way.

One detail that surprised even Chen: luxury hotel guests - particularly millennials at high-end properties - adopted the platform faster than anyone expected. The assumption was that premium hospitality meant premium in-person service. Turns out, the premium experience is not being interrupted by a ringing phone.