channel-management
(15)
TravelNet Solutions and the expensive art of keeping things together
Now called Track, TravelNet Solutions sells vacation rental operators a connected way to run their businesses. Its most revealing lesson begins with 20 Palm Springs homes and a cancellation policy.
DerbySoft and the Secret Life of a Hotel Room
A hotel room has to travel through a surprising number of computers before you can sleep in it. DerbySoft makes those computers agree - and is moving into the paperwork that follows you home.
Hostaway made a business out of your vacation’s busywork
Behind the holiday photos sit calendars, cleaners and a small mountain of messages. Hostaway turned that administrative mess into a software business, survived a travel shutdown and is now betting on AI to handle more of the shift.
The Hotel Desk That Fits in a Pocket
Independent innkeepers once needed a calendar, five extranets and a talent for midnight arithmetic. eviivo turned that mess into one cloud dashboard - then spent two decades teaching it payments, pricing, AI chat and even how to open the door.
The Fintech Hiding in 50,000 Corner Stores
Emida spent two decades making the neighborhood shop behave like a digital wallet. Its advantage is not a prettier app - it is the stubborn, physical work of reaching cash customers where they already stand.
A $370 Million Bet That Hotels Want One Brain, Not Ten Dashboards
Lighthouse started by showing hotels what competitors charged. Now it wants to become the commercial operating system behind every room sold - a much bigger promise, backed by a much bigger check.
Mayra López Built a Career Where Cash Meets Code
From affiliate sales to running MBX Mexico, Mayra López has spent two decades learning how relationships become infrastructure - one retailer, provider and payment at a time.
Distro Nation Turned Other People’s YouTube Uploads Into an Exit
The tiny company behind the ‘Harlem Shake’ money trail survived an acquisition, an eight-year corporate chapter and a spinout. Fifteen years later, Symphonic bought the rights-management machine - and the lesson is more useful than the meme.
Guesty Turned Airbnb Chaos Into a Control Room - Now It Wants AI to Run the Night Shift
The Soto twins began by doing the chores behind an Airbnb listing. Thirteen years later, Guesty is selling the control room - and betting that an army of software agents can run much of it.
Enerex Is Turning Retail Energy's Spreadsheet Problem Into a $2 Billion Data Rail
Retail energy runs on contracts, commissions and a heroic amount of copy-paste. Enerex spent nearly two decades turning one broker's messy workflow into infrastructure used by more than 130 market participants - and the playbook is remarkably stealable.
RedAwning Built the Plumbing Behind 20,000 Vacation Rentals - Then Travel Stopped
RedAwning promised one connection to every major booking shelf. A pandemic forced it to shrink, refocus, and turn that distribution network into a fuller operating system for hosts.
Checkmate
Checkmate (ItsaCheckmate.com Inc.) is a New York-based restaurant technology company that connects digital ordering channels to a restaurant's point-of-sale system. Founded in 2016 by Vishal Agarwal, its platform pipes orders from third-party marketplaces like DoorDash and Uber Eats directly into the POS, lets operators manage menus across dozens of channels from one dashboard, and now extends into first-party web and app ordering, self-service kiosks, voice AI for phone and drive-thru, catering, loyalty, and accounting reconciliation. The company reports more than 23,000 live restaurant locations and 130+ integrations, and raised a $10M Series B led by Tiger Global in October 2024.
Model N
Model N is a Redwood City-based enterprise software company that builds cloud revenue-management systems for pharmaceutical, medtech, semiconductor, and high-tech manufacturers. Its Revenue Cloud automates pricing, quoting, contracting, rebates, incentives, and regulatory compliance - the commercial machinery that governs how life sciences and high-tech companies book and protect their top line. Founded in 1999 and taken public in 2013, Model N was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2024 for $1.25 billion and now serves 150+ leading brands across more than 120 countries.
Technical Communities
Technical Communities, Inc. (TCI) is a San Mateo, California holding company founded in 1999 that helps technology manufacturers sell into government markets and helps government buyers find the equipment they need at the price they want. It combines GSA contract management and public-sector go-to-market services with a family of e-commerce marketplaces - TestMart, GSAmart, NAVICPmart, ITmart, MedMart and CloudMart - that handle quoting, order management and compliant fulfillment for federal, state, local and commercial buyers of test-and-measurement, IT, medical and cloud products.
Darrin Chen
Darrin Chen is the VP of Global Partners (NPN) GTM & Operations at NVIDIA, where he leads go-to-market strategy and operations for the NVIDIA Partner Network - the company's global partner ecosystem spanning solution providers, systems integrators, and channel partners. With 30+ years in technology from storage to networking to AI infrastructure, Chen joined NVIDIA through the 2020 acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, where he had spent over a decade building worldwide channel programs. In mid-2023, NVIDIA expanded his mandate as it split its global channel chief role in two, tapping Chen to oversee its entire NPN program as the company transformed into a full-stack AI computing company.