hotel-operations
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Axel Lingbert Is Trading Hotel Software for a Seat in the Lobby
A ski-hotel shift taught Axel Lingbert that hospitality improves when staff can leave the screen. Now the Zaplar co-founder is trying to redesign the software that keeps them stuck there.
Branigan Mulcahy Wants the Hotel Lobby to Stop Behaving Like a Queue
A Marine turned real-estate developer turned hotel-tech founder is redesigning arrival around a simple idea: software should handle the transaction so people can handle the welcome.
Bloom Spent a Year Building a Hotel With No Guests - Now It Wants 100,000 Rooms
India's yellow hotel chain made the unfashionable choice to perfect its operating system before chasing flags on maps. The bet produced a profitable ₹357.5 crore business - and a field guide for founders who would rather earn the right to scale.
The Hotel Operator That Thinks Like a Software Engineer
JNR Management buys complicated hotels, fixes the physical asset and rewires the operation behind it. Its edge is less about a flashy brand than a repeatable system for making many properties behave like one business.
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.
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.
Tailos
Tailos (formerly Maidbot) is an Austin, Texas robotics company building AI-powered autonomous cleaning robots for commercial spaces. Its flagship product, Rosie, is a self-navigating commercial robot vacuum that uses self-driving-car technology - LiDAR, 3D depth cameras, and proprietary SLAM - to clean hotels, multifamily buildings, and senior-living facilities with no pre-mapping or setup. The company's pitch is plain: automate the most repetitive, physically punishing parts of cleaning so housekeepers can do higher-value work, with operators saving roughly 54 minutes per labor hour.
Kate Adamson
Kate Adamson is the CEO and co-founder of Folio, a financial operations platform built for hotels. A former pre-professional ballet dancer who studied engineering at Princeton before switching to economics, she spent five years at Plaid scaling sales and product teams, where she once shipped a Paycheck Protection Program product from idea to market in about eight days. In 2023 she teamed up with Plaid's founding designer Al Hertz to build Folio, which turns the messy world of hotel purchasing, invoices, and payments into one procure-to-pay platform. Folio won the E20X Judge's Choice Award at HITEC 2024 and raised a $14M Series A led by Thrive Capital and Construct Capital in July 2025.