hospitality-tech
(46)
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.
Bikky
Bikky is a customer data platform built exclusively for large, multi-unit restaurant brands. It unifies data from point-of-sale systems, online ordering, payments, and loyalty programs into a single guest view, letting operators measure how every marketing, menu, and operational decision affects guest behavior, frequency, and lifetime value. Founded in 2017 and based in New York City, Bikky serves brands like Bojangles, Dave's Hot Chicken, MOD Pizza, and Robeks across thousands of locations.
Blackbird Labs
Blackbird Labs is a New York-based restaurant technology company that pairs a consumer dining app with a blockchain-based payments and loyalty network. Founded in 2022 by Resy and Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal, Blackbird lets diners check in at participating restaurants, earn a rewards currency called $FLY, and pay their bill through the app, while giving restaurants lower payment-processing fees and direct ownership of their guest data. The company runs its own layer-2 network, Flynet, and operates in New York, San Francisco, and Charleston with roughly 1,000 restaurants on the platform.
Momos
Momos is an AI customer platform for multi-location restaurant and retail brands. It unifies customer service, reviews, reputation, listings, feedback and local marketing into one system so operators can respond to guests, catch problems in real time, and turn reviews and feedback into repeat visits. Founded in 2021 by former Uber and Grab operators, Momos powers tens of thousands of locations across brands including Shake Shack, Baskin-Robbins, Just Salad and Guzman y Gomez.
Nory
Nory is an AI-native restaurant operating system that unifies business intelligence, inventory, workforce management and payroll into a single control centre for hospitality operators. Founded by restaurateur Conor Sheridan, it plugs into a restaurant's existing tech stack and uses real-time data plus predictive analytics - and a crew of 'agentic' AI assistants - to forecast demand, plan staffing, manage ordering and keep the P&L on track. Operators report cutting operating costs by nearly 20 percent and reducing food waste by up to 50 percent. Backed by $62.6M in funding, Nory serves multi-site groups from Black Sheep Coffee to the Jamie Oliver Group and is expanding into the United States.
Kim Lalande
Kim Lalande is the founder and CEO of KEY.co, an Austin-based hospitality marketplace that pairs vetted luxury vacation homes with in-home concierge services such as private chefs, grocery stocking, and in-home massage. Drawing on years of business-heavy travel and hotel stays, she built KEY to close the gap between the space of a private home and the service of a five-star hotel. Since founding the company in 2014, she has grown it to thousands of curated homes across dozens of destinations in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean, raising roughly $16-18M in venture funding along the way.
Li-ran Navon
Li-ran Navon is the founder and CEO of Sauce, a white-label ordering, delivery, and AI-driven retention platform that lets independent restaurants own their online ordering, delivery logistics, and customer data instead of surrendering margin and relationships to third-party marketplaces. A serial entrepreneur who earlier built the voice-ordering startup Say2eat through Coca-Cola's incubator, Navon has grown Sauce from scratch to eight figures in revenue with a remote-first team spread across four continents, and says Sauce helped restaurants avoid more than $20 million in third-party fees in 2024.
Franki
Franki is a Los Angeles-based mobile app that reimagines the restaurant review as short-form video. Often described as a 'TikTok for restaurant reviews,' it lets diners discover local spots through authentic video recommendations from vetted local creators, then earns them cash back when they eat and drink at participating venues. Creators earn for posting, consumers earn for going out, and restaurants get measurable, conversion-focused advertising - a three-sided platform aimed at the multibillion-dollar experience economy.
Innowi Inc.
Innowi Inc. is a Santa Clara, California restaurant-technology company that builds an all-in-one point-of-sale and ordering platform. Its stack spans POS, self-service kiosks, tabletop QR ordering, online ordering and delivery, a kitchen display system, marketing and rewards, analytics, and employee management - designed to help independent and multi-location restaurants cut third-party commission fees, sync orders across channels, and run leaner operations.
Rachael Nemeth
Rachael Nemeth is the CEO and co-founder of Opus Training, a mobile, AI-powered training platform for distributed, frontline workforces used by multi-unit restaurants and hospitality operators. She spent more than a decade running operations and people functions across New York kitchens, including Union Square Hospitality Group, Baked NYC, and Hot Bread Kitchen, and is a certified ESL instructor who first built ESL Works to teach industry English by text message. Opus, founded in 2020, has raised roughly $10.8M with a $6.8M Series A in 2023 and translates training into 130 languages.
Incept AI
Incept AI is a New York-based voice AI company building order-taking systems for quick-service restaurants, starting with the two hardest environments in the business: the drive-thru and the phone. Founded in 2024 by former Amazon and Presto Automation engineers, Incept pairs a proprietary neural audio engine that strips out background noise, echo and crosstalk with foundation models and POS integrations, so the AI can complete restaurant orders end-to-end without a human stepping in. The company says its system reaches 95%+ order completion without human intervention, well above the roughly 83% where most competitors escalate to a person, and raised a $3 million pre-seed round led by Rally Ventures in early 2025.
MiChamba
MiChamba is a Mexico-founded startup that turns WhatsApp into an operational management platform for frontline and deskless teams across Latin America and the US Hispanic market. Instead of forcing workers onto a new app, it layers AI agents - led by an assistant named MarIA - on top of the messaging tool people already use, converting informal chats into trackable tasks, reports, and productivity data. It raised a $2.25M pre-seed round in 2025 and counts Hilton, Pemex, and Repsol among 50+ customers in construction, hospitality, logistics, and industrial sectors.
MustHaveMenus
MustHaveMenus is a Bend, Oregon software company that gives restaurants, bars, hotels, and hospitality groups an all-in-one platform to design, print, and publish menus across print, web, QR codes, and digital signage. Founded by serial entrepreneur Jim Williams, it started as a simple menu-design tool and grew into a menu operations system with the world's largest library of restaurant design templates - 15,000-plus and counting - used by tens of thousands of businesses worldwide.
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.
Jason Craparo
Jason Craparo is the founder and CEO of Hovr, a Philadelphia-based marketing technology company whose patented, no-code tool sits on top of hotel and travel brand websites and turns static pages into interactive, video-rich experiences that drive direct bookings. A Babson MBA who started as a dishwasher at 14 and ran Sonic Drive-In franchises by 21, Jason spent six years at social enterprise Juma Ventures before founding networking apps Contap and Hio, then pivoting the technology into hospitality. He holds a dozen granted patents, is a certified private pilot who flies aerobatics, runs triathlons, and is a father of three.
João Machado
João Machado is the founder and CEO of Savearth, a Portuguese climate-tech startup that uses AI-powered acoustic sensing to measure hotel shower water use in real time and reward guests for using less. After reading that nearly five billion people could face water scarcity by 2050, he built a coin-sized device that installs in under a minute and has cut shower water use by up to 48% in pilots with hotel groups like PortoBay, Numa and Hilton. Savearth won the Portuguese edition of ClimateLaunchpad, closed a €400,000 round in 2026, and is scaling across Portugal and Spain.
Brett Robbins
Brett Robbins is the first chief executive of Snapfix, the Dublin-born software company that turns a photo and a QR code into a work order for the world's buildings, hotels, and equipment. Appointed in June 2024 by founders Paul McCarthy and Cathal Greaney, Robbins is a New York-trained operator with a Columbia degree in economics and anthropology and a career spent at the intersection of real estate, retail, and hospitality - including stints at Orchard, StayTerra, Neighborhoods.com, and Ohana Ventures. He believes service businesses should chase 'wow' rather than 'okay,' and that AI's job in maintenance is to quietly make managers' lives easier. Off the clock, he chairs the Economic Development Commission in Norfolk, Connecticut, the small town where a missing home internet connection turned him into a civic builder.
Christian Wiens
Christian Wiens is the founder and CEO of Loman AI, an Austin-based voice AI platform that answers the phone for restaurants. A former restaurant worker who started in a Southern California BBQ joint in sixth grade and later spent a decade in B2B SaaS go-to-market roles, Wiens built Loman to recapture the orders restaurants lose every night when no one can get to the phone. Since launching in 2024, Loman has processed millions of calls and tens of millions in order volume, raised a $3.5M seed round led by Next Coast Ventures, and partnered with SpotOn, OpenTable, Toast and Square.
Matthias Depenbusch
Matthias Depenbusch is a German-trained, Vienna-based serial founder who builds software for unglamorous but expensive problems. He co-founded AVISIO, a SaaS platform that used AI-based purchasing suggestions to cut the cost of goods sold for independent 4- and 5-star hotels and restaurants, integrating their POS and PMS systems to automate inventory and ordering. Before that he helped launch Appinio, the Hamburg real-time mobile market-research company that landed 8th in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and on the FT 1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies. AVISIO won the Hospitality UPGRADE Award 2020 before filing for insolvency in 2023 amid a frozen funding climate.
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.
Ricardo Flores
Ricardo Flores is the co-founder and CEO of MiChamba, a startup that turns WhatsApp into an AI-powered management platform for deskless teams in construction, logistics, hospitality, and industrial services across Latin America. A kid who worked scorching El Paso roofs before heading to Georgetown and Wall Street, he left finance and an early seat at fintech Wealth.com to build software for the blue-collar workforce he came from. Less than a year after launch, MiChamba raised a $2.25M pre-seed led by Wollef and signed names like Pemex, Hilton, and Repsol, betting that for the 3 billion people who run their work lives on WhatsApp, management should live there too.
Touradj Barman
Touradj Barman is the co-founder and CEO of Up 'n go, the San Diego company that lets restaurant guests scan a QR code, pull up their check, and pay without downloading an app. An MIT graduate with a Yale MBA and more than 20 issued patents - some acquired by Microsoft and now underpinning push and group messaging - Barman started Up 'n go to solve a small annoyance, splitting the check at a single San Diego restaurant. The platform has since processed more than $1.1 billion across over 16 million checks for 11 million-plus guests nationwide.
Alex Sambvani
Alex Sambvani is the co-founder and CEO of Slang.ai, a New York voice-AI company that answers the phone for restaurants so staff don't have to. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer with a Harvard MBA, he met co-founder Gabriel Duncan on Spotify's data science team, where the two won a company-wide hackathon with a personality-forward voice app. He turned a childhood love of cooking and robotics into a company that has handled more than 25 million guest calls for over 2,000 restaurant locations. Slang.ai has raised roughly $68 million across its rounds, including a $36 million Series B, with backers ranging from Homebrew and Underscore VC to chef Tom Colicchio.