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.
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.