Harman
Narula

From Paper Forms to a Hospitality AI Empire

Somewhere around 2017, a hotel general manager handed Harman Narula a fax machine printout. It was a credit card authorization form - the kind hotels had been using since roughly the Reagan administration. Guests filled them out by hand. Staff filed them in drawers. Fraud happened anyway. PCI compliance officers lost sleep.

Narula, who had spent years inside Starwood Hotels' global strategy operation and then at Bain & Company advising hotel executives, understood exactly how broken this was. Not theoretically. He had seen it up close, from the inside, across dozens of properties and brands. He knew what hoteliers wanted. He knew what guests expected. He knew the gap between the two was enormous and almost entirely ignored by the technology industry.

He also knew his co-founder, SJ Sawhney, for most of his life. Sawhney had spent time building technology products for boutique hotel booking. Together, they looked at the hotel industry - a $570 billion global behemoth still running paper-and-fax back-office operations - and saw not a difficult sell but an obvious one.

Canary Technologies launched to digitize that single miserable credit card form. It was a deliberately small door into a very large room. Hotels signed up because solving one compliance headache was worth paying for. What Narula and Sawhney understood, and their competitors did not, was that once a hotel trusted you with one piece of the guest journey, every other piece became a conversation.

The wedge became a platform. The platform became the category. The category is now worth $600 million.

100 Cold Calls a Day

There is a version of this story where Canary raises a seed round, builds a product, and waits for inbound leads. That is not what happened. In the earliest days, Narula was personally making more than 100 cold calls a day to hotel general managers, revenue directors, and operations leads. Not 10. Not 20. One hundred.

This is the detail that separates Narula's operational philosophy from the VC-funded-product-led-growth playbook. He did not wait for product-market fit to announce itself. He went looking for it, hotel by hotel, objection by objection. And when he found it - the moment a hotelier's voice changed from polite skepticism to genuine interest - he recognized it immediately, because he had been trained at Bain to recognize exactly that shift.

He talks about a framework he calls "The Activated Hair on Fire" - the difference between a latent problem a customer acknowledges and a problem so painful they will act on it today. Paper credit card authorization forms crossed that line. Hotels did not just prefer a digital solution. They needed one for compliance reasons, for fraud reduction, for staff sanity. The activation energy was already there.

COVID and the Check That Changed Everything

In the first week of March 2020, Harman Narula was trying to collect physical checks from hotels. The industry had just been hit by the fastest demand collapse in modern travel history. Properties that had been full on a Monday were at single-digit occupancy by Friday. Narula later described the experience as "terror" - not the existential terror of watching revenue evaporate, but the specific operational terror of realizing that every analog touchpoint the hotel industry relied on had become physically impossible overnight.

It was a crisis that proved the thesis. Hotels that had already moved to digital guest communications could still reach their guests. Hotels running on paper forms and phone calls could not. When the world reopened, no one was calling the front desk to ask about room service menus. They were texting. They expected a reply in under two minutes. They wanted to check in on their phone and walk straight to the elevator.

Canary was already building for exactly this. The pandemic did not change the roadmap - it compressed the timeline for the entire industry's willingness to adopt it.

Building the AI Stack for 20,000 Hotels

The current Canary platform is not the company that started with a credit card form. It is a full AI-powered guest management operating system: digital check-in, contactless checkout, guest messaging, upsell automation, digital tipping, mobile keys, and - since February 2025 - an end-to-end AI voice platform that can handle front desk calls, concierge requests, central reservations, and direct bookings without a human on the line.

Narula's argument for AI in hospitality is precise: over 80% of guest interactions follow predictable patterns. A guest asking about checkout time at 6 AM does not need a human to read from a card. Automating that interaction does not degrade the experience - it frees the staff member to be somewhere the human touch actually matters, like welcoming a family that just arrived after a delayed flight.

The enterprise client list reflects what that argument sounds like to the biggest buyers in the industry. Marriott International uses Canary for digital tipping. Four Seasons uses the guest management platform. Wyndham Hotels & Resorts is rolling out the AI Voice platform across 700+ franchised properties globally. IHG is on board. Choice Hotels is on board. These are not proof-of-concept pilots. These are operating relationships at scale.

In January 2026, HotelTechAwards named Canary the winner in nine separate product categories - including the first-ever Best Voice Bot & Call Center Software award - based on feedback from 25,000 global hoteliers. Nine categories in one year, in an industry where trust is earned property by property and brand by brand.

Cornell, Wharton, and the Long Road to a Startup

Narula graduated from Cornell University's Nolan School of Hotel Administration in 2009 - one of the world's most respected programs precisely because it produces people who understand the hotel business from the inside. This is not an incidental credential. It is the reason hotel GMs take his calls, the reason his product decisions reflect operational reality rather than engineering assumptions, and the reason Canary's earliest advocates were industry insiders rather than tech converts.

After Cornell, he joined Citigroup in a principal M&A and corporate strategy role within the Office of the CEO. From there, he moved to Starwood Hotels & Resorts' Global Strategy Group, working across all 10 of Starwood's brands on strategic initiatives - the exact vantage point from which the hotel industry's technology gap becomes visible. He spent five years there before leaving for Wharton to complete an MBA, and then two years at Bain & Company advising clients across hospitality, technology, and private equity.

By the time he co-founded Canary in 2017, he had spent nearly a decade accumulating every angle on the problem: the financial engineering view from Citigroup, the brand operations view from Starwood, the strategic consulting view from Bain. The startup was not a departure from that experience. It was its logical conclusion.

Today, Narula serves as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Cornell's Nolan School, mentoring the next generation of hospitality and technology founders from the same program that shaped his understanding of the industry he is now reshaping.