The procure-to-pay platform built for hotels - and the people who keep them running.
Somewhere right now, a delivery truck is backing up to a hotel loading dock. Crates of produce, linens, cleaning supplies. The old script: a clipboard, a packing slip, a stack of invoices headed for someone's desk to be keyed in by hand.
Folio rewrote that script. The order was placed in a smart cart against an approved catalog. The price was checked against a negotiated rate the moment it hit the basket. The invoice will match itself against the purchase order. The supplier will be paid by virtual card in a few clicks, and a rebate will quietly flow back. Nobody will lose an afternoon to a spreadsheet. That is the promise of a procure-to-pay platform built for one industry and one industry only: hospitality.
Today Folio is a roughly 33-person, remote-first company headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, with a five-product suite and hundreds of hotels running on it. People in the industry have taken to calling it "the Amazon for hotels," which is flattering and also slightly misses the point. Amazon sells you things. Folio also makes sure you should have bought them, that you paid the right price, and that the books balance afterward.
Hospitality is a business of small percentages. A hotel buys from dozens of suppliers - food, beverage, amenities, maintenance, linens - across properties that each keep their own books. The buying is fragmented, the invoices arrive in every format imaginable, and the approvals crawl through email. Somewhere in that mess, money leaks: a price that drifted above a negotiated rate, a duplicate invoice, a rebate left on the table, a budget blown before anyone noticed.
Most of the tools built to fix this were designed for general enterprise procurement and then awkwardly bent toward hotels. The category had a clear incumbent in BirchStreet, founded back in 2002, and a handful of cost-control products. What it did not have was something that felt like it was made for the controller working a night audit, or the executive chef counting cases of tomatoes at dawn.
That is the tension Folio exists to resolve: an industry that obsesses over the guest experience down to the folded towel, while its back office still ran on clipboards and faith. Great service out front, organized chaos out back.
Folio began in 2023 with two people who had spent years at Plaid, the company that wired together America's bank accounts and apps. Kate Adamson - a Princeton economist and CFA charterholder who had led credit and mortgage products there, after a stint at JPMorgan - took the CEO seat. Al Hertz, who had been a founding designer at Plaid and started his career making posters and album art for musicians, took on design.
Their method was unusual. Instead of starting with a clever piece of technology and hunting for someone to sell it to, they started with a customer and worked backward. Over a run of breakfasts, they decided who they wanted to serve - hospitality - before settling on what to build. The bet was that a vertical this large, this fragmented, and this underserved by software would reward a team willing to learn its quirks rather than abstract them away.
Princeton economics, CFA charterholder. Former JPMorgan, then Plaid (Head of Credit Product, Head of Mortgage). The operator translating a messy industry into a clean balance sheet.
Founding designer at Plaid; started out designing for musicians in Pennsylvania. The craftsman who insists hotel finance software can actually feel good to use.
Two ex-Plaid colleagues, a lot of breakfast, and a hunch that hotels deserved better than a clipboard.
Kate Adamson and Al Hertz leave Plaid, pick hospitality, and start building. Agency thoughtbot helps ship the first Ruby on Rails MVP.
Folio launches at hospitality tech's biggest stage and takes home the E20X Judge's Choice Award - before its first birthday.
A paying-customer MVP scales to hundreds of properties, including a Marriott Autograph Collection hotel and HHM Hotels.
Thrive Capital and Construct Capital co-lead, with Redseed VC and SciFi VC joining, to expand the platform.
Lightning-fast stock counting and valuation with ERP sync. A two-time "Chopped" champion chef says it cut count time in half.
Corporate Visa cards, budget controls, and AI receipt reconciliation round out a five-product suite.
Folio is not a single app so much as a spine running through a hotel's finances. Each product handles one stage of the money's journey, and the whole point is that they talk to each other.
A managed marketplace with punchout-style catalogs, a smart cart, group-purchasing rates surfaced at the moment of choice, and budgets enforced right at checkout.
AI-powered invoice processing that auto-matches, routes, and approves invoices touchlessly. One property reports up to 70% fully automated and roughly 40 hours a week back.
Supplier payments by virtual card and ACH, with rebates flowing back. The headline stat: a 39-step payment process compressed to 3 clicks.
Fast stock counting and valuation that syncs with the ERP and ties back into purchasing, invoicing, and payments.
Folio Visa Corporate Cards (issued by Core Bank, Member FDIC), budget controls, AI receipt reconciliation, and multi-property accounting.
Buy it, get billed for it, pay for it, count it, expense it. Folio wants to be in the room for all five.
Skepticism is the right starting position for any company that claims to save you money. So consider the receipts. HHM Hotels - which manages more than 39,000 rooms and around $2 billion in revenue across the US and Canada - is a named customer. So is a Marriott Autograph Collection property. Folio reports reaching 200-plus hotels in its first year and being on track for close to a billion dollars in annual purchasing volume within roughly two years of launch.
There is also the matter of the rooms. Folio's customers are not pilot projects in a lab; they are working hotels with guests checking in and chefs counting cases. The platform won HITEC's 2024 Judge's Choice Award, the kind of nod that comes from an industry that has seen plenty of software promise the moon and deliver another login.
Folio's stated mission is to help hospitality thrive financially - to bring properties, suppliers, and financial systems into one place so hotel teams can control spend, lift profitability, and reclaim the hours that paperwork quietly steals. The company runs on four words it keeps close: Craft, Optimism, Ownership, Hospitality. It is remote-first, with pods and hubs across Durham, San Francisco, and New York, and it gathers everyone in person each quarter at hotel partner locations it cheerfully calls "Folio Jams."
The design DNA matters here. When your head of design started out making album covers and believes "great design is when something is done so well that it feels like it was made exactly for you," the back office stops being an afterthought. That is the unfashionable bet: that boring software, made well, is worth more than flashy software made for a demo.
Hospitality procurement has had the same incumbent for two decades. The economics of hotels - tight margins, fragmented buying, real money lost to small inefficiencies - have not changed, but the tools to fix them finally have. AI can now read an invoice, match it, and route it without a human babysitter. Payments can carry rebates. Catalogs can enforce a budget before a manager overspends rather than after.
Folio's $14M from Thrive and Construct is a bet that the company built for this moment can take the category, not just rent a corner of it. With five products live and purchasing volume climbing toward the billions, the question is no longer whether hotels will run their finances on modern software. It is which one - and Folio intends to be the answer.
It's 6 a.m. again. The truck backs up to the loading dock. The crates come off.
This time there is no clipboard. The order was right, the price was checked, the invoice is matching itself, the supplier is getting paid, and the rebate is on its way. The chef counts the cases in half the time and gets back to the kitchen. The controller, who used to dread the night audit, has gone home. The hotel is still about the guest at the front desk - but now the back office is too. That is the script Folio rewrote, one receiving dock at a time.
No company YouTube or X account exists yet - so the founder interview and the press are where the story lives for now.