guest-experience
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The Company That Beached an iPad in the Wynn Two Weeks After Apple Shipped It
A three-person shop in Mill Neck, New York has been quietly running the wine lists and room-service screens of some of the world's most expensive hotels for two decades. Here is how a first-mover bet on the iPad turned into a durable niche.
Altamarea Group
Ahmass Fakahany walked away from the top of Merrill Lynch to open a seafood restaurant across from Central Park. Two decades later, Altamarea Group runs more than 25 dining rooms on three continents.
ARTOTEL Group
ARTOTEL Group is an Indonesian hospitality company that turns hotels into cultural platforms by pairing hotel design with original work from emerging Indonesian contemporary artists. Founded in 2011 by siblings Erastus and Christine Radjimin, it has grown from a single art hotel into one of Indonesia's largest hospitality operators, managing 100+ properties through four business pillars - Stay, Dine, Play, and Shop - across boutique, midscale, and premium brands.
Flowtel
Flowtel is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator W25) building an AI operating system for hotels. Its voice and chat agents answer guest calls and messages and complete routine tasks - room bookings, dining and spa reservations, amenity requests and concierge questions - handing off to human staff only when needed. The pitch is a high-touch guest experience for properties that cannot staff a 24/7 front desk. The company was founded in 2024 by Eylon Miz and is led by a small team based in San Francisco.
Zaplar
Zaplar is a Stockholm-based, Y Combinator (S26) startup building an AI-native operating system for hotels and event venues. Instead of stitching together the legacy hotel stack - PMS, POS, booking engine, CRS, RMS and MICE tools - Zaplar consolidates them into one platform where AI agents handle bookings, guest messaging, RFPs, event planning and follow-ups. Staff review and approve the agents' suggested actions, so hoteliers keep control while spending less time in front of a screen.
TripWorks
TripWorks is a New York-based, AI- and business-intelligence-driven booking, automation, and management platform built for tour, activity, and attraction operators. Founded in 2019 by Aaron Fessler and described as 'built by operators for operators,' the platform consolidates online and in-person bookings, reservations, dynamic pricing, digital waivers, staff and resource scheduling, OTA channel management, and marketing automation into a single system. It powers thousands of daily bookings worldwide and, following a $6M Series A in January 2026 led by Spring Mountain Capital, is expanding AI-driven pricing, revenue optimization, and predictive demand tools.
Eleven Software
Eleven Software is a cloud-based managed Wi-Fi platform built for hospitality, multifamily, and community connectivity. Its flagship product, ElevenOS, lets hotel brands, apartment operators, and telecom carriers centrally manage guest and resident Wi-Fi across multiple properties, devices, and hardware vendors - handling authentication, branded onboarding, loyalty integration, tiered bandwidth, and real-time analytics without replacing existing infrastructure. Founded in 2001 and now based in Las Vegas, Eleven serves brands like Marriott, Accor, and carriers such as AT&T and Charter.
YepChat
YepChat is a Los Angeles company that builds a phone and communication platform made specifically for restaurants. It routes calls dynamically, captures missed calls, turns inbound phone traffic into digital orders and reservations, filters robocalls, and layers on SMS and analytics. It began around 2015 as an intelligent business-texting product powered by IBM Watson, then pivoted to serving the restaurant industry, where phones ring at the worst possible moments.
Quinn Goldstein
Quinn Goldstein is the founder and CEO of YepChat, a Venice Beach-based voice AI platform built exclusively for restaurants. He and his MIT classmate Daniel Ingram launched the company in 2015 to fix the one piece of restaurant technology everyone ignored: the ringing phone. YepChat turns calls into digital orders, routes them intelligently during peak hours, and scores phone health across 18 metrics for brands like Sweetgreen, Tender Greens, Ruth's Chris, and Alfred Coffee. Before YepChat, Goldstein founded the group-activities service Vixzy and spent years as a startup advisor at GCG.
Cloudbeds
Cloudbeds is a San Diego-based hospitality management platform that gives independent hotels, hostels, vacation rentals, and lodging groups a single cloud system to run reservations, distribution, payments, revenue management, and guest communication. Founded in 2012 by Adam Harris and Richard Castle, the fully remote company replaces the tangle of disconnected legacy tools that property owners juggle, serving tens of thousands of properties across roughly 150 countries and, more recently, layering in AI through its Cloudbeds Intelligence and Signals products.
Canary Technologies
Canary Technologies is the AI-powered Guest Management System trusted by 20,000+ hotels in 100+ countries. Founded in 2017 by Harman Singh Narula and SJ Sawhney, it sells AI Voice, AI Webchat, Mobile Check-In, Digital Contracts, Upsells, and Digital Tipping to brands like Marriott, Wyndham, Four Seasons, and Best Western.
Harman Narula
Harman Singh Narula is the Co-Founder and CEO of Canary Technologies, the hospitality industry's leading AI-powered guest management platform trusted by 20,000+ hotels across 100+ countries. A Cornell Hotel School and Wharton MBA graduate, Narula co-founded Canary in 2017 alongside childhood friend SJ Sawhney, tackling the hotel industry's notoriously outdated technology infrastructure one paper form at a time. What started as a solution to clunky credit card authorization forms has grown into a $600 million company backed by Y Combinator, Insight Partners, and Brighton Park Capital, with $175 million raised in total funding including an $80 million Series D in June 2025.
Evan Chen
Evan Chen is the founder and CEO of Akia, a San Francisco-based AI-powered guest experience platform built for hotels and vacation rentals. A former Solutions Engineering Manager at Meta, Chen pivoted from big tech to rethink how the hospitality industry communicates - replacing phone calls and paper forms with text-based AI that learns individual guest preferences. Under his leadership, Akia has raised $12.1M, counts Marriott, Hyatt, IHG, and The Ritz-Carlton among its clients, and is engineering what Chen calls 'the future of agentic hospitality.'