Tagged: hospitality
30 results
Truffle (YC S26)
Truffle (now operating as Marble) is a New York-based Y Combinator S26 startup building an AI-native operating system for the restaurant back-of-house. It replaces the patchwork of spreadsheets, clipboards and disconnected point solutions that restaurants, cafes and bars rely on with a single system: computer vision and voice AI capture real-time inventory levels, machine-learning models forecast item-level demand, and AI agents run end-to-end workflows like procurement, invoice reconciliation, scheduling, food prep and menu engineering. Founded by Aakar Khanna (CEO) and Arjun Chaliha (CTO), it targets the billions the hospitality industry loses each year to stockouts, food waste and lost profit.
Kozystay
Kozystay is a Jakarta-based, technology-enabled short-term rental management company and Indonesia's largest player in the flexible-stay segment. It manages more than 1,000 premium apartments and villas across Jakarta, Bandung and Bali on behalf of property owners, handling pricing, bookings, housekeeping, guest communication and maintenance under a profit-sharing model. Founded in 2019 by Dane Putranto and Frans Winarto, the company reached EBITDA breakeven, raised a Series A in 2025 led by Integra Partners with Intudo Ventures and Cercano Management, and acquired Bali villa manager BaliSuperHost to build a nationwide operating platform.
Ralph Lauren
Ralph Lauren Corporation is an American luxury lifestyle company founded in 1967 by designer Ralph Lauren, who started by selling neckties under the Polo name. Today it is a global house of brands spanning apparel, footwear and accessories, home, fragrances, and hospitality, selling an aspirational vision of timeless American style across roughly 24,000 employees and more than $8 billion in annual revenue. Known for its polo-player emblem and cinematic marketing, the company operates a direct-to-consumer, omnichannel model of retail stores, wholesale partnerships, digital commerce, and licensing that reaches customers in over 100 countries.
SensorFlow
SensorFlow is a Singapore-based proptech company that uses wireless IoT sensors and AI to help hotels monitor, analyze and automate their energy use - primarily air-conditioning. Its retrofit-ready hardware installs in minutes with no upfront cost and typically cuts HVAC energy consumption by around 30%, letting properties lower operating costs and carbon emissions while keeping guest rooms comfortable. Founded in 2016 and backed by investors including Openspace Ventures and Gaw Capital, the company serves hospitality brands across Asia-Pacific and beyond.
The Luxe Nomad
The Luxe Nomad is a Singapore-based luxury vacation rental company and villa management business, positioned as Asia-Pacific's largest of its kind. Founded in 2012 by Stephanie Chai, it began as a booking portal for hand-picked luxury villas and has grown into a full-service operator that both markets and manages more than 1,400 rooms across destinations including Bali, Koh Samui, Phuket and Japan's Hokkaido (Niseko, Rusutsu, Furano). It pairs an e-commerce booking platform with on-the-ground property management and concierge services for high-end travellers and villa owners.
Travelio
Travelio is an Indonesian property-technology company that runs an online marketplace and end-to-end management platform for apartments, houses and villas. Founded in Jakarta in 2015, it lets landlords hand over units for professional management while giving tenants furnished, standardized homes they can book and pay for daily, monthly or annually - including a rare month-by-month payment option in a market that traditionally demands a full year up front. Often called 'Indonesia's Airbnb,' Travelio manages roughly 15,000 exclusive properties across a dozen cities and is expanding into rent-to-own housing.
JAZ Hotel Group
JAZ Hotel Group is the hospitality arm of Travco Group International, Egypt's largest travel conglomerate. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Sheikh Zayed City, Giza, JAZ owns and manages a portfolio of 70-plus beach resorts and hotels concentrated on Egypt's Red Sea and Mediterranean coasts, with newer properties in Zanzibar and the UAE. Its brands - JAZ, JAZ Elite, JAZ Neo, Iberotel, Solymar and others - focus largely on all-inclusive leisure travel for European and regional holidaymakers.
Andrea Johnston
Andrea Johnston is a seasoned revenue and operations executive with over 30 years of building high-growth businesses across SaaS, consumer tech, and marketplace platforms. After a decade at OpenTable — rising from VP of Western Region Sales to Chief Operating Officer — she led global revenue at Corel/Alludo, joined Truckstop as Chief Revenue Officer in 2024, and is now CEO at Franki, the video-led restaurant discovery and rewards app that is rewriting how 25,000+ monthly users find their next great meal. Johnston is a go-to-market architect, board advisor to multiple tech startups, and speaker at the 2025 Khosla Ventures CEO Summit.
Figure8
Figure8 is a New York-based, experience-first development company founded by Maryellis Bunn and Manish Vora, the team behind the Museum of Ice Cream. It designs and operates 'experiums' - large-scale immersive, multi-sensory spaces built to draw people offline and into shared, playful, in-person moments. Backed by a $40M Series A at a reported $200M valuation, Figure8 builds and scales its own experiential brands while taking on commissioned activations for outside partners.
KEY.co
KEY.co is an Austin-based luxury travel company that reimagines the vacation rental as a hotel-grade service experience. It curates design-forward homes and pairs them with in-home services - pre-arrival grocery stocking, private chefs, in-home spa and massage, and a dedicated guest-services team - across dozens of destinations in the U.S., Caribbean, Mexico and Canada. Founded in 2014 by Kim Lalande, the company operates as a three-sided marketplace connecting travelers, property managers and local vendors, and has raised roughly $15.8M to date.
Palm Tree Crew Holdings
Palm Tree Crew is a Miami-based entertainment, hospitality and investment holding company founded by Norwegian DJ and producer Kygo (Kyrre Gorvell-Dahll) and his manager Myles Shear. Built around the globe-trotting Palm Tree Music Festival, the company spans four lines of business - live events, hospitality venues and beach clubs, a consumer lifestyle and apparel brand, and a multi-product investment platform. In September 2025 it raised a $20 million Series B led by WME Group at a $215 million valuation to fund international festival expansion, new clubs and hotels, and early-stage bets in beverages and consumer goods.
TALEA Beer Co.
TALEA Beer Co. is a women-founded and women-owned craft brewery based in Brooklyn, New York, built to make beer approachable for people the craft category has historically overlooked. Founded in 2018 by Tara Hankinson and LeAnn Darland and opened as a brewery and taproom in 2021, TALEA brews fruit-forward, lower-alcohol reinventions of classic styles and runs a growing network of design-forward taprooms across New York City, alongside a direct-to-consumer online shop, retail distribution in 1,300+ New York stores, and events.
Legion Technologies
Legion Technologies builds an AI-native workforce management (WFM) platform for the hourly workforce. Founded in 2016 by former SAP chief product officer Sanish Mondkar, the Redwood City company automates demand forecasting, employee scheduling, time and attendance, and labor optimization for retailers, restaurants, healthcare and fitness operators. Its stated mission is to turn hourly jobs into good jobs by helping employers cut labor costs while giving frontline workers more control, flexibility, and faster access to pay.
Michael Diaz
Michael Diaz is the CEO of Palm Tree Crew Holdings, the diversified lifestyle, live-events, and investment company Kygo and Myles Shear founded in 2020. A former Duke undergrad who spent his early career in investment banking at UBS and as a Managing Director at LionTree, Diaz now runs a business that in 2025 raised a $20M Series B led by WME Group at a $215M valuation, opened four Palm Tree Club hospitality venues in under a year, and expanded its festival footprint from Oahu and West Palm Beach to Saint-Tropez and Sardinia.
Tara Hankinson
Tara Hankinson is the co-founder and co-CEO of TALEA Beer Co., New York City's first woman-owned production brewery. After leaving jobs at PwC, The New York Times and a beer e-commerce startup, she and co-founder LeAnn Darland launched TALEA in 2019 to make craft beer approachable for the people it had long ignored. She runs the brand, marketing and a growing chain of design-forward taprooms across Manhattan and Brooklyn, with beer stocked in more than 1,300 retailers.
AVISIO
AVISIO was a Vienna-based hospitality-tech startup that built a cloud, AI-assisted procurement and inventory platform for independent hotels and restaurants. Founded in 2019 by Matthias Depenbusch and Johannes Ossanna, it integrated with POS and PMS systems to automate stocktaking, compare supplier prices in real time, and suggest order quantities from booking data - promising roughly 10% lower purchasing costs and less waste. It raised over EUR 2 million from backers including Falkensteiner Ventures and Next Floor Ventures before filing for insolvency in April 2023.
Marco Experiences
Marco Experiences is a San Francisco startup that turns the miserable job of booking a company offsite into something closer to a search box. Its AI scans 4,000-plus vetted hotels, negotiates group rates 20-40% below retail, and lets teams book rooms, meeting space, and meals with no phone calls, contracts, or service fees. Founded in 2019 by Suman Siva and Nick Freeman, Marco started life as a social-events product, pivoted through virtual experiences during the pandemic, and landed on group travel for distributed teams - now used by 5,000+ teams including Figma, Gusto, Ramp, and Notion.
Jim Williams
Jim Williams is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of MustHaveMenus, a Bend, Oregon-based platform serving 10,000+ restaurants, hotels, and food service businesses with cloud-based menu design, digital signage, and menu management tools. Before MustHaveMenus, he sold email-marketing startup MarketHome to ClickAction for $15 million in 1999, co-founded church-tech platform Sharefaith (acquired by Ministry Brands in 2018), and made an early angel investment in HotelTonight (acquired by Airbnb in 2019). An English major who started his first business at age 11, Williams embodies the accidental founder: perpetually optimistic, deeply curious about design, and committed to building software that solves genuinely unglamorous problems.
Chloe Harrouche
Chloe Harrouche is the co-founder and CEO of The Lanby, a New York membership practice that reimagines primary care as a hospitality-led, relationship-driven experience. A University of Pennsylvania bioengineering graduate and former Deloitte healthcare strategy consultant, she built The Lanby around a simple bet: that primary care should feel less like a waiting room and more like a team that actually knows you. Members get a dedicated care trio - a lead physician, a wellness advisor, and a care manager - working from one coordinated plan.
Michael Greene
Michael Greene is the CEO and President of Skylark, a New York based luxury travel agency that blends human travel advisors with high-tech booking tools. A Cornell Hotel School graduate, he spent a decade building hospitality marketplaces - leading the Amex Global Dining Network and global growth at Resy, co-founding the members-only restaurant platform Dorsia, and serving as Chief of Staff at Avero. He now leads Skylark and its members-only last-minute luxury hotel platform, Wanderluxe.
Vivian Wang
Vivian Wang is the founder and CEO of LANDED, a generative-AI hiring platform built for the people who never had software built for them: the line cooks, cashiers, baristas and shift managers behind America's restaurants, hospitality groups and retailers. Launched in late 2019, LANDED automates sourcing, screening, vetting and interview scheduling for high-volume hourly roles, and by 2025 had grown to 500+ business customers, a database of 3.2 million-plus candidates and 6.3 million-plus job matches. A Princeton graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Enterprise Technology, Wang has raised roughly $8.7M from investors including Javelin Venture Partners and Blockchain Capital, and frames her mission around the 2.7 billion hourly workers worldwide.
Folio
Folio is a B2B fintech and procure-to-pay platform built specifically for the hospitality industry, primarily hotels and their restaurants. Often described as the 'Amazon for hotels,' it unifies purchasing, invoice processing, supplier payments, inventory, and expense management into one system, using AI to automate invoice matching and surface savings. Founded in 2023 by two former Plaid colleagues and based in Durham, North Carolina, Folio raised a $14M Series A led by Thrive Capital and Construct Capital in July 2025 and powers hundreds of hotels.
Museum of Ice Cream
Museum of Ice Cream is an immersive, multi-sensory entertainment brand that turns the simple pleasure of ice cream into a walk-through playground of color, nostalgia, and unlimited treats. Born as a 2016 New York pop-up built around a now-iconic sprinkle pool, it grew into a chain of permanent 'experiums' across the U.S. and Singapore under parent company Figure8, blending hospitality, retail, and shareable social moments into one ticketed experience.
Slang AI
Slang AI builds an agentic voice AI platform purpose-built for restaurants and hospitality. Its 'Superhost' answers every inbound call 24/7 with warmth and precision - booking and modifying reservations, fielding private-dining and event inquiries, recognizing returning guests, and routing high-value requests to staff. The platform serves 2,000+ restaurant locations, has handled roughly 25 million calls from 10 million unique guests, and reports 95%+ guest satisfaction, helping operators stop missing calls and recover lost revenue.
Visiting Media
Visiting Media is a hospitality technology and immersive-content company that helps hotels and resorts sell their physical spaces remotely. Its flagship platform, TrueTour, turns properties into interactive 360 virtual tours, 3D models, and shareable media that sales teams use to run virtual site inspections. The newer SalesHub platform layers digital asset management, distribution, and analytics on top. Used by brands including Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG, the company exists to close the gap between what a property actually looks like and what a buyer can see before they ever arrive.
Manish Vora
Manish Vora is the co-founder and co-CEO of Museum of Ice Cream, the candy-colored immersive attraction that turned a 2016 self-funded pop-up in New York's Meatpacking District into a global chain of 'experiums' with locations across the US and Singapore. A former Citigroup investment banker turned art-and-experience entrepreneur, he previously co-founded the contemporary art platform GREY AREA and ran the experience-tech venue Lightbox before partnering with Maryellis Bunn. He now co-leads Figure8, the experience-first development company that is the parent of Museum of Ice Cream and raised a $40M Series A in 2019 at a $200M valuation.
PathSpot
PathSpot is a New York-based health and safety company for the food service industry. Its flagship HandScanner uses visible-light fluorescence spectroscopy to detect invisible contaminants on employees' hands in about two seconds, flagging the molecules that carry norovirus, E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria and Hepatitis A. Around that scanner the company built SafetySuite, a connected hardware-and-software platform covering temperature logging, digital task lists and food labeling. PathSpot operates in more than 10,000 food service locations worldwide.
Brad Olson
Brad Olson runs Sollis Health, the members-only concierge urgent and emergency care company that treats your time as the real luxury. He came to medicine sideways - from Bain consulting to Starwood's loyalty empire to Peloton's first 100 employees - and now applies the playbook of emotional loyalty and hospitality to a 15,000-member, 11-clinic operation where the average wait to see an ER-boarded doctor is zero to fifteen minutes. His pitch is blunt: if any consumer business ran like a hospital ER, it would be out of business the next day.
Airbnb
Airbnb is a global travel marketplace that lets hosts rent out homes, rooms, and experiences to guests in more than 220 countries and regions. Born in 2008 from three air mattresses on a San Francisco apartment floor, it turned spare space into a category-defining business, went public in 2020 at roughly a $100 billion valuation, and in 2025 expanded beyond stays into Services and a redesigned Experiences product - positioning itself as an everything app for travel.
John Paul
John Paul is a Paris-based premium concierge and customer-loyalty company that operates white-label services for luxury brands and enterprises. Founded in 2007-2008 by David Amsellem, it pairs human concierges with a proprietary CRM platform to manage the relationships brands have with their most valuable clients and employees. After merging with US rival LesConcierges in 2015, it was acquired by AccorHotels in 2016 and now runs as a business accelerator inside the Accor group, serving clients such as Visa, Hyundai, Orange and luxury houses across automotive, finance, fashion and travel.