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.'