hospitality-tech
(28)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Will Pacio
Will Pacio is the co-founder and CEO of Expo, a Dallas-based AI platform that pulls a restaurant's scattered data - POS, inventory, labor, guest feedback - into one dashboard operators can talk to. A Stanford psychology grad who walked away from a planned medical career to cook on the opening team at Thomas Keller's Per Se, he ran IT for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, founded the fast-casual chain Spice Kit, then built the restaurant-staffing marketplace Pared before spinning it into Expo. His pitch: bring the 'Moneyball' approach to multi-unit restaurants so non-technical owners can make decisions with data instead of gut feel.
Christine de Wendel
Christine de Wendel is the co-founder and U.S. CEO of sunday, the QR-code checkout company that shrinks the worst part of dinner - waiting for the bill - from roughly fifteen minutes to about ten seconds. She spent two decades scaling European e-commerce unicorns Zalando and ManoMano out of Paris before founding sunday at age 40 with Big Mamma restaurateurs Victor Lugger and Tigrane Seydoux, then moved home to Atlanta to plant the company's U.S. flag. A Georgetown School of Foreign Service graduate who once wanted to run the United Nations, she now runs a hospitality-payments business that has processed billions in restaurant transactions.
Amr Aloufi
Amr Aloufi is a Co-Founder at Beyond (formerly Beyond Pricing), a San Francisco-based SaaS platform that uses AI and dynamic pricing algorithms to maximize revenue for short-term rental property managers and vacation rental hosts worldwide. With roots in Saudi Arabia and a background in business administration and human resources, Aloufi brought operational and business development acumen to a company that has grown to serve 715,000+ listings across 44,000+ cities, raised $46M in funding, and priced over $15 billion in bookings.
Bryson Koehler
Bryson Koehler is the CEO of Revinate, a hospitality SaaS company specializing in guest data platforms, CRM, and marketing automation for hotels. A career technology executive with deep roots in enterprise data and cloud infrastructure, Koehler previously served as CTO at IBM Watson & Cloud Platform and as EVP/Chief Technology, Product, Data & Analytics Officer at Equifax. He built the legendary Weather Company data platform - processing 4GB of data per second from 40 million mobile devices - before IBM acquired it in 2016 partly due to his work. His return to hospitality with Revinate merges two career obsessions: data engineering at scale and the guest experience.
Harman Narula
Harman Singh Narula is the Co-Founder and CEO of Canary Technologies, the hospitality industry's leading AI-powered guest management platform trusted by 20,000+ hotels across 100+ countries. A Cornell Hotel School and Wharton MBA graduate, Narula co-founded Canary in 2017 alongside childhood friend SJ Sawhney, tackling the hotel industry's notoriously outdated technology infrastructure one paper form at a time. What started as a solution to clunky credit card authorization forms has grown into a $600 million company backed by Y Combinator, Insight Partners, and Brighton Park Capital, with $175 million raised in total funding including an $80 million Series D in June 2025.
Julie Brinkman
Julie Brinkman is CEO of Beyond, the leading revenue management platform for short-term rental operators. She joined as COO on March 2, 2020 - just 10 days before global COVID travel bans - and navigated the company through the pandemic to emerge stronger, earning her promotion to CEO in February 2021. A University of Michigan Ross School of Business alumna, Brinkman spent a decade at Deloitte before sharpening her growth instincts at Groupon and Hireology. She now leads a global team of ~310 across 30 countries, focused on replacing gut-feel pricing with data-driven revenue optimization for property managers worldwide.
Shawn Lane
Shawn Lane is the Chief Executive Officer of Ottimate, an AI-powered accounts payable automation and payments platform serving mid-market businesses across hospitality, healthcare, construction, retail, and manufacturing. With more than 30 years of experience scaling enterprise SaaS and supply chain software companies - from Procter & Gamble to i2 Technologies to E2open - Lane brings rare operational depth to one of fintech's fastest-growing categories. His career is a through-line of companies that challenged legacy processes with intelligent automation, and Ottimate is his biggest stage yet.
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.'
Barrett Boston
Barrett Boston is the former Chief Executive Officer of Ottimate (formerly Plate IQ), a San Francisco-based AI-powered accounts payable automation platform. Appointed CEO in October 2021 following FTV Capital's majority investment, Boston transformed the company from a restaurant-focused invoice tool into a multi-industry AP automation leader serving hospitality, healthcare, grocery, retail, construction, and manufacturing sectors. Under his leadership, Ottimate rebranded from Plate IQ, raised $160 million in Series B funding, launched an industry-first AI engine for AP, and introduced Conversational AP - an AI assistant for finance teams. Boston stepped down in March 2026, passing the CEO role to Shawn Lane. His career spans IBM, TravelClick, TriNet, and Merrill Lynch, with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Economics from Duke University.
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff is the CEO of Visiting Media, a Portland-based hospitality sales enablement company, and a veteran tech executive whose career has spanned Yahoo, Microsoft, BitTorrent, and Mozilla. Raised in a socialist collective outside Eugene, Oregon - by a pioneering rock concert promoter - he grew up thinking deeply about systems, autonomy, and how teams work. He is the author of 'Growing Up Fast' (2014), a pioneer of Agile Marketing methodology, the first CMO to pull all Facebook advertising after the 2018 data breach, and co-host of the podcast 'This is Your Life in Silicon Valley.'
Sidharth Saxena
Sidharth Saxena is the Co-Founder and CEO of Docyt, a Santa Clara-based AI accounting automation platform serving small and medium-sized businesses. An IIT Guwahati industrial design graduate who later earned a master's from Indiana University, he spent years as a UX designer at Oracle and VMware before co-founding Docyt with fellow IIT alumnus Sugam Pandey in 2016. Under his leadership, Docyt has raised $27.2M in total funding - including a $12M pre-Series B in August 2025 - and built its proprietary High Precision Accounting Intelligence (HpAI) engine trained on 128 billion data points across 20+ industry verticals, delivering 90%+ reductions in accounting review time for its clients.
Tom Fox
Tom Fox is the Chief Executive Officer of Fingermark, a New Zealand-founded technology company that deploys vision AI, intelligent kiosks, and digital menu systems inside some of the world's biggest quick-service restaurant chains. Based in San Francisco, Fox leads a 90-person global operation whose Eyecue platform turns ordinary restaurant cameras into real-time operational intelligence - monitoring drive-thru queues, measuring speed of service, and surfacing AI-generated performance diagnostics across fleets of McDonald's, Taco Bell, KFC, Popeyes, and Carl's Jr. locations. He brings a career built at the intersection of restaurant technology and enterprise operations, having previously served as Chief Business Officer at Omnivore (acquired by Olo), Chief Product Officer at Bite, and Head of Partnerships at Ansa.
Vaseem Anjum
Vaseem Anjum is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and CEO of Innowi Inc., a Santa Clara-based restaurant technology company delivering all-in-one POS, kiosk ordering, QR code ordering, and kitchen management solutions to restaurants across the US. Before entering the restaurant tech space, he founded SchoolCity Inc. in 1999, an influential K-12 assessment and personalized learning platform that served nearly 2 million students across 140+ districts before merging into Illuminate Education in 2018. With a hardware engineering background spanning National Semiconductor and NEC Electronics, Anjum brings a rare arc from chip design to edtech exit to hospitality software.