hotel-technology
(5)
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.
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.
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Narula co-founded Canary in 2017 alongside childhood friend SJ Sawhney, tackling the hotel industry's notoriously outdated technology infrastructure one paper form at a time.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.
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.'