hospitality-ai
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The Hotel Back Office Has a $13 Billion Tab. BirchStreet Wants to Make It Boring.
Hotels sell escape, then reconcile the invoices. BirchStreet built the unglamorous operating layer behind 8,489 hospitality locations - and its most useful lesson is that automation only works when suppliers, data and people arrive together.
Eylon Miz Killed a Working Startup. The Next Call Came From a Hotel.
After Casixty found 500 customers, its founder decided the product made its own market worse. One YC pivot, one move to San Francisco and one $3 million raise later, Eylon Miz is teaching hotel software to answer the phone without forgetting the guest.
Akia
Akia wants to turn the hotel front desk into an invisible operating system - answering the midnight text, issuing the door code and selling the late checkout while the human staff handles the moments that actually need a human.
Brain Co.
Brain Co. is a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company that deploys production-ready AI applications for the world's most complex, regulated industries - from government and healthcare to hospitality, energy, and supply chain. Founded by a constellation of Silicon Valley heavyweights including Elad Gil and Dan Ashton, and backed by an elite roster of investors including Patrick Collison, Reid Hoffman, and Andrej Karpathy, Brain Co. raised a $30M Series A in September 2025. Its core technology converts dense regulatory documents into executable rules engines that make AI decisions auditable and compliant - so that governments can permit faster, hospitals can care better, and supply chains can run leaner.
Dan Ashton
Dan Ashton is the CEO and Co-Founder of Brain Co., a San Francisco-based AI company that builds applied intelligence platforms for the world's most complex institutions - from government permit offices to hospital systems. He brought his AI startup Serene AI into Brain Co.'s orbit and now leads a company backed by $30M in Series A funding from Elad Gil, Affinity Partners, Patrick Collison, Reid Hoffman, and Andrej Karpathy. Before Brain Co., he was an early operator at three unicorns - Opendoor, Faire, and Clubhouse - and a McKinsey consultant before that. Brain Co. has already deployed AI that unlocks $375M annually in permitting value and mitigated $100M+ in supply chain losses.