He flew to 50 countries in lie-flat seats before he could legally rent the car waiting at arrivals. Now he is trying to hand that cheat code to everyone.
Max Morganroth, seat 1A of his own company.
Max Morganroth is the co-founder and CEO of Rove, and his entire company starts from a small humiliation most travelers know well: the reward you want sits behind a card you cannot get. Premium miles, lounge access, the lie-flat seat over the Pacific - all of it gated by a credit history that a 19-year-old simply does not have yet. Morganroth had the appetite for the rewards long before the system would let him in. So he built the door.
Rove, launched in 2023 and headquartered in New York, issues a single currency called Rove Miles. You earn them the way you already live - booking a hotel you were going to book anyway, buying flights, shopping online through a browser extension - and then you move them, one-to-one, into more than a dozen airline and hotel loyalty programs spanning all three major alliances. The pitch is almost rude in its simplicity: one mile, redeemable nearly everywhere, no premium card required. For the estimated 70 million-plus Americans who cannot access elite travel cards, that is not a feature. It is a passport.
Traditional airline loyalty programs have forced travelers into rigid ecosystems. Our goal is to make earning and redeeming miles as effortless as possible.
Before Rove was a startup, it was a hobby that got out of hand. Morganroth treated the global loyalty industry the way other people treat chess - a closed system with exploitable rules. Between classes at Wharton and the startups he was already running, he and his eventual co-founder, Arhan Chhabra, flew to more than 50 countries in business and first class for a fraction of face value. The running tally they cite is north of $400,000 in flights and hotels, redeemed for what most people spend on a weekend.
That is the strange specific worth holding onto: this is a CEO who learned his industry not from a deck but from a thousand award charts, transfer bonuses, and 2 a.m. seat searches. He did not study the loyalty maze. He lived inside it, and decided it should not be a maze at all.
Rove's promise is that one earned mile keeps its value across partners instead of evaporating into a single airline's walled garden. The bars below sketch the program's headline mechanics as described publicly.
Book hotels and flights, or shop through Rove's portal and Chrome extension across thousands of retailers. Miles credit instantly on non-refundable stays.
Everything lands in one balance. No card application, no blackout dates, no chasing a single airline's calendar.
Transfer one-to-one into airline and hotel partners across every major alliance, then redeem across 140+ airlines and 200,000+ hotels.
We want to ensure everyone can 'travel hack' their way to a new continent for the first time.
Rove is not Morganroth's first attempt at making strangers' lives easier through software. His earlier projects read like a founder warming up: specialized Bluetooth software designed to connect people at events, and a B2B edtech platform aimed at recruiting between schools and startups. Neither became a household name. Both taught the same lesson - find the friction, then remove it - that now sits at the center of Rove.
He grew up in Birmingham and went on to graduate from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2025. His co-founder, Arhan Chhabra, came from Harvard with a computer science and economics background and left to build full time. Chhabra writes much of the technical machinery; Morganroth named the problem, shaped the mission, and put himself out front as CEO. In early 2024 the pair took Rove through Y Combinator's Winter batch, working with partner Tom Blomfield, and picked up early backing from General Catalyst, Soma Capital, and angels drawn from fintechs like SoFi.
The recognition followed the work. Morganroth and the Rove team were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, cited specifically for making travel rewards attainable for people without deep credit histories or premium-card access. It is a tidy bit of symmetry: the kid who got locked out of the rewards game is now on the list of people who changed it.
Morganroth talks about Rove less as a points app and more as a layer over the whole travel economy. The public roadmap gestures at card-linked offers, dining rewards, private-jet perks, and an AI-powered travel agent that does the 2 a.m. award searching so you do not have to. The through-line is the same one he started with at 19: take the dark art that a small priesthood of travel hackers guards, and turn it into a default setting for everyone else.
It is an ambitious flattening of an industry that profits from confusion. Whether Rove fully pulls it off is still being written. But the founder's bet is unusually personal - he is, in effect, building the company he wishes had existed when he first pressed his nose against the glass of a first-class cabin he could not yet afford.
The cheat codeHe learned his entire industry from award charts and 2 a.m. seat searches, not a business-school case study.
Frequent flyer, literally50+ countries stamped into a passport - most of them reached in seats that retail for five figures.
The receiptsHe and Chhabra claim $400,000+ in flights and hotels redeemed for the price of a nice dinner.
Serial starterBefore miles, he tried to connect strangers at parties with Bluetooth software.
The full circleLocked out of premium travel cards as a teenager; now on the list of people who broke the lock.
25xThe number he likes most: miles you can stack on a hotel you were booking anyway.
"We want everyone to travel hack their way to a new continent for the first time."