hospitality-tech
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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.
Poster POS knows where the sauce went
A Ukrainian software company found a business in the unglamorous details of running a restaurant. Its pitch starts at the till and follows every ingredient, invoice and order behind it.
Access Hospitality wants to give hotels their time back
A hotel can sell a room in seconds and spend hours untangling the booking. Access Hospitality is connecting the systems behind the stay, with Guestline at the centre of a much bigger software bet.
Rota Put the Staffing Agency Inside the App
Rota began by filling last-minute hospitality shifts. The more durable business was the machinery behind the marketplace - software that lets employers, agencies and workers arrange an unruly week from the same screen.
ClearCourse Bought the Software Behind Britain’s Small Businesses - Then Put Payments Inside It
The quiet systems running a marina, a garage or a golf club are hard to replace and easy to overlook. ClearCourse has spent eight years buying those niche operators, joining their workflows to payments, and betting that useful beats fashionable.
Lavanda Was a Laundry App. Then the Landlords Called.
A consumer laundry service discovered its best customers were property operators with a stranger problem: empty beds, mismatched software and no clean way to mix hotel-speed stays with residential leases. Lavanda followed the demand and built the operating system instead.
Kevin Bryla Wants Restaurant Tech to Know When to Leave the Table
The SpotOn marketing chief has spent three decades selling complex systems. His clearest idea is disarmingly simple: let technology handle the friction so restaurants can get back to hospitality.
Brett Kohn Has Spent a Career Turning Messy Data Into Clear Decisions
Before hotel AI, Brett Kohn spent years asking whether mobile ads even knew where they were. His career is a study in a durable executive skill: making sophisticated data useful without pretending it is simple.
Cvent Nearly Died With $400,000 on the Founder’s Credit Cards. Then It Sold for $4.6 Billion.
A lawyer built software to escape the sticky-note chaos of event planning. The dot-com crash nearly buried it; a two-sided event machine, two IPOs and a private-equity relay turned it into a $4.6 billion business.
He Put a Meter on the Pour - Then Found the Platform
Jose Hevia spent years learning where restaurants leak time, product and money. A beer table sketched after a trip to Spain became DraftServ - and a second act built one measured pour at a time.
Max Porterkhamsy Put the Concierge Desk in a Checkout Flow
A childhood barbecue-sauce seller became a chef, a concierge, and then the founder of Epicurate. His six-year lesson: luxury feels personal out front because somebody has made the machinery disappear out back.
Brice Gumpel Found a Business in the Empty Chairs
A college food account taught Brice Gumpel what restaurant owners fear after the dinner rush. He turned the empty table into a product, then had to reinvent that product when every dining room closed.
7shifts Fired Two-Thirds of Its Customers - Then Built the Restaurant Back Office
The Canadian scheduling startup found its edge by walking away from most of its market. Now 55,000 restaurants use it to turn sticky notes, shift swaps and payroll math into one connected system.
Epicurate Turned Vacation-Rental Concierge Chaos Into a Booking Engine - Then Journey Bought It
A former Le Bernardin cook saw luxury concierges running on email chains and memory. Six years later, his provider-first marketplace powered experiences across more than 12,000 homes - and became Journey's route into the moments beyond the room.
Relay Tried to Replace the Kids’ Phone. Frontline Workers Found the Bigger Job.
A $99 screen-free gadget for children found its real market in hotel corridors, stadium kitchens and factory floors. Relay’s second act is a useful lesson in letting an unexpected customer rewrite the pitch.
The $10,000 Beer Tap That Became an Operating System for Every Pour
Jose Hevia spent about $10,000 putting self-pour beer on a restaurant table. The real business appeared later: software that can identify a drinker, price every ounce and tell an operator what is happening inside thousands of ordinary dispensers.
The Restaurant App That Pays You to Eat - and Charges Only When the Table Fills
Restaurants cannot save tonight's empty table for tomorrow. Seated built a marketplace around that perishable inventory - then survived the shutdown that made every table empty at once.
The Phone Wouldn't Stop Ringing. Hostie Turned That Restaurant Headache Into a $16 Million AI Company
A restaurateur and an AI engineer started with one painfully ordinary problem: the phone ringing during dinner service. Their answer now handles millions of guest conversations - but its real test is whether automation can make a restaurant feel more human, not less.
The Company Betting That a Text Beats a Survey
Founded in 2010 with the Mall of America as its first account, Kipsu turned front-desk texting into a real-time engagement engine now used by 1,600+ organizations in about 30 countries.
Brian Hassan Found a Fintech Company Inside the Tip Jar
An armored truck outside a San Francisco restaurant exposed a stubborn payment problem. Brian Hassan and his longtime co-founder turned that small contradiction into Kickfin - software built to move restaurant tips as quickly as the dinner check.
The Local Travel Platform Teaching South Africans to Book Home First
A R12,000 garage project became a homegrown booking habit. Now LekkeSlaap is betting that local language, human help and 38,000-plus stays can keep travel value closer to home.
Shift4 Wants to Own the Moment Before You Tap 'Pay'
The Pennsylvania payments company built its edge by hiding complexity behind the checkout. Now a global acquisition spree is testing whether one platform can follow customers from dinner to the ballpark to a tax-free shopping counter abroad.
Alex Chatzieleftheriou
He spent five years living out of hotel rooms as a consultant. Then he built the company that lets you move into a city with nothing but a suitcase.
Abhinav Kapur
He spent his nights doing food deliveries and his days reading equity research. Then he built the software his mother-in-law never had - so every restaurant could remember its regulars.
PoloTab
PoloTab is a Mexico City-based company building an all-in-one point-of-sale platform for cafes and restaurants. It bundles sales, inventory, invoicing, kitchen displays, delivery-app integration and multi-branch management into software that installs in about 15 minutes and keeps working without internet. More than 800 venues across 70+ Mexican cities run on it.
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.
H2O Hospitality, Ltd.
H2O Hospitality is a Seoul-founded hospitality technology company that digitizes hotel operations end to end - from booking and mobile check-in to revenue and facility management. Its flagship platform, H2O Flow, connects reservation, property, revenue and facility systems into one workflow, and was the first service in Asia to achieve a validated integration with Oracle's OPERA PMS. Founded in 2015 by Cornell-trained, Forbes 30 Under 30 CEO John (Woong Hee) Lee, the company manages roughly 210,000 room units across seven countries and has raised about $48.5M, including a $30M Series C led by Kakao Investment and Korea Development Bank in 2021.
HXE (Huixiaoer)
HXE (Huixiaoer) is a Beijing-based MICE technology platform that lets companies search, compare and book hotel conference rooms, meeting venues and event services online. Marketed globally as Eventbest, it aggregates 150,000+ hotels and event venues, has served more than 400,000 corporate clients, and partners with major hotel groups including Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Shangri-La, Wyndham and Langham. HXE turns a traditionally offline, quote-by-phone procurement process - meetings, conferences, incentive trips and group business travel - into a one-stop digital marketplace covering venue data, price comparison, catering, accommodation and logistics.
Softinn Solutions
Softinn Solutions is a Malaysian hotel technology company that builds cloud-based hotel management software for boutique hotels, resorts, villas and hotel chains across the Asia Pacific. Its all-in-one platform pairs a Property Management System with a Channel Manager connected to 40+ OTAs, a commission-free booking engine, a website CMS and self-service check-in kiosks - designed around the mission to 'make hotelier work easier.' Founded in Melaka in 2012 by JeeShen Lee and Caren, Softinn serves 1,000+ hotel owners in markets including Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Singapore.
Conor Sheridan
Conor Sheridan is the founder and CEO of Nory, an AI-native operating system for the hospitality industry. A former quantitative trader and investment strategist, he left finance to build Mad Egg, one of Ireland's fastest-growing fried chicken chains, then created Nory to solve the operational problems he faced running restaurants. Nory now helps operators manage inventory, workforce, payroll, procurement and finance, and raised a $37m Series B in 2025 led by Kinnevik, bringing total funding to roughly $62.6m.