travel-tech
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Barsi Luna Put the Airport Ride on the Itinerary
The Cancun founder spent years watching a polished travel industry fumble its final mile. His answer was an operations company dressed as an API - built for the local transport businesses global booking sites could not easily reach.
Mohak Nahta Built Atlys From One Very Expensive Passport Problem
Five visas for one work trip gave the former Pinterest engineer a product idea. The harder lesson came later: simplifying travel means earning trust whenever software meets an embassy, a courier and a deadline.
Terry Broussard Turned One Bad Night of RV Planning Into a Booking Business
A four-time RV owner handed his son-in-law a phone and issued a simple challenge: find us a campsite tonight. The frustrating search became Spot2Nite - and a lesson in building software from a problem you know by heart.
Aviel Siman-Tov Bets the Real Travel Deal Starts After You Book
The Oversee co-founder built a company around an overlooked truth: airfare can fall after checkout. A decade later, his software is chasing a larger prize - giving travel agents back the time that busywork steals.
Adam Morvitz Turned the Fine Print of Travel Into a Flight Plan
He began by finding improbable flights for colleagues. A 60-agent concierge service later, Adam Morvitz saw the real opportunity: turn the private craft of award travel into public infrastructure.
Atyab Bhatti Put the Travel Agent Inside the Chat Window
A college idea waited for the technology to catch up. A decade later, Bhatti's conversational booking company had turned 15-minute travel chores into 99-second exchanges - and found a buyer with global reach.
Amiad Soto Started With Cleaning Supplies. Now He Is Automating the Messy Middle of Travel
Guesty began with two opinionated twins, a beach interrupted by guest messages, and a pair of founders holding cleaning supplies. Thirteen years later, Amiad Soto is still chasing the same idea: make the invisible work of hospitality disappear.
Mayank Kukreja Took the Expense Report Personally
After nearly 200 days a year on the road, the former engineer, consultant and Myntra operator turned a familiar office annoyance into ITILITE - then learned to rebuild a travel company while nobody was traveling.
Todd Sullivan
Todd Sullivan is the CEO and co-founder of Humoniq (YC S25), an AI-native business process outsourcing company that uses voice and text AI agents to run customer support and back-office operations for airlines, airports, OTAs and travel management companies. An Australian software engineer turned repeat founder, he previously co-founded Flightfox (YC S12), a human-powered flight-search marketplace he grew to roughly $22M in annual revenue, and before that Globetrooper, a social travel platform he sold in 2011. He is rebuilding the travel support layer he spent a decade running by hand, this time with AI.
Dustin Downing
Dustin Downing is the CEO of Key Data, a short-term and vacation rental analytics company that turns property management system data into real-time market intelligence across hundreds of global markets. He stepped into the role in mid-2026 after joining as president, succeeding co-founder Jason Sprenkle. Downing spent nearly two decades in product leadership across travel and data-driven technology, including nearly a decade at Sabre, a stint at influencer commerce firm LTK, and six years scaling OrderMyGear. His focus at Key Data is deepening the company's proprietary dataset and building the AI-driven intelligence layer he believes the rental industry will run on.
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.
Ted Clements
Ted Clements is the CEO of WeTravel, a San Francisco-based payments and booking platform for multi-day and group travel operators. He took the top job in January 2023 after co-founder Johannes Koeppel stepped aside to become Chief Product Officer and personally recruited him. Clements built his career at FareHarbor, joining as one of the first mainland US sales reps and rising to COO and acting CEO, helping scale the day-tour software company to 700-plus employees and an acquisition by Booking Holdings. In September 2025 he led WeTravel through a $92 million Series C round from Sapphire Ventures, pushing the company toward its goal of becoming the operating system for the fragmented multi-day travel market.
Jan Seale
Jan Seale is the CEO and co-founder of Out of Office, a Chicago-based travel app that turns recommendations from your own friends and trusted circle into bookable trips across thousands of cities. A Cornell grad who spent years at Gap, Trunk Club, and Havenly before building her own company, she launched a travel startup in the middle of a global pandemic - and became one of the first 100 Black women in the United States to raise more than a million dollars in venture capital. She runs on gratitude, literally: she starts every morning by naming ten things she is grateful for.
Aaron Sekhri
Aaron Sekhri is the co-founder and CEO of Le Walk, a New York startup that turns your headphones into a hands-free local tour guide. After product roles at Uber ATG's self-driving program and TikTok, where he built the mini-program developer platform, Sekhri left the infinite scroll behind to build something that makes people look up. Le Walk delivers GPS-triggered audio tours narrated by real expert guides in 22 languages, and launched publicly in September 2025 with a $4.1 million seed round co-led by Adverb Ventures and Lerer Hippeau.
Nikhil Sethi
Nikhil Sethi is the co-founder and CEO of Workgrounds, a New York startup using AI to automate the slow, phone-and-email world of corporate hotel room block booking. He is a repeat founder: alongside Garrett Ullom he built the adtech company Adaptly from a Northwestern dorm room into a 200-person business serving brands like PepsiCo, Fox, and Domino's before Accenture acquired it in 2018. After running global programmatic services at Accenture, he reunited with Ullom in 2022 to attack a problem they had both lived through - the painful logistics of booking group travel - raising $2.6M to launch Workgrounds.
Sachin Narode
Sachin Narode is the co-founder and CEO of Xeni, a New York-based Web 3.0 operating system for travel that lets anyone launch a white-label booking platform with wholesale inventory, instant blockchain settlement, and no-code tools. A self-described serial entrepreneur with a background in medicine, molecular biology and finance, he has built and sold companies across biotech and wearables, advised technology and data teams at Morgan Stanley, and once became known as 'the Mango Man' for introducing a mango market to the United States. He preaches a single gospel: execution over ideas.
Adam Harris
Adam Harris is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudbeds, the hospitality management platform he started in 2012 with Richard Castle after a sketchy reservation experience at a Brazilian pousada. From a back-of-the-napkin idea, he built Cloudbeds into a fully remote company of 700+ people across 40+ countries that powers tens of thousands of lodging properties in more than 150 countries. A former Wall Street investment banker turned serial entrepreneur, Harris has built and sold multiple companies, traveled to more than 51 countries, and is now steering Cloudbeds through the AI era while championing a no-office culture.
Pierre-Olivier Lepage
Pierre-Olivier Lepage is the CEO and co-founder of Cruisebound, a New York-based digital-first cruise booking platform he launched in 2022 after struggling to book his own first cruise online. A Polytechnique Montréal engineering graduate who earned dual MIT master's degrees in Transportation and Operations Research, Lepage previously built operations at Rocket Travel (a Booking Holdings company) and consulted at McKinsey before betting that the $66B cruise industry — where 80% of bookings still flow through travel agents — was ripe for a tech-native overhaul. Cruisebound has since raised $37.8M in total funding, serves customers averaging nine years younger than typical cruisers, and routes 42% of support queries through AI, positioning itself as the fastest-growing national online cruise agency.
David Chait
David Chait is the co-founder and CEO of Travefy, the itinerary, proposal and client-management platform that thousands of travel advisors use to make their trips look as good as they feel. He started it in 2012 to untangle a friend's bachelor party booked across 75 emails, pivoted the whole company to serve travel professionals in 2016, and built it into one of the quiet workhorses of the travel-advisor economy from an office in Lincoln, Nebraska. A former McKinsey consultant and Obama-era SBA policy advisor with two Columbia degrees, he is now an industry advocate, vice chair of The Travel Institute board, and ASTA's 2017 Entrepreneur of the Year.
Debby Soo
Debby Soo is the CEO of OpenTable, the global restaurant reservation platform serving 65,000+ restaurant partners across 110+ countries. A Stanford and MIT Sloan alumna, she took the helm in August 2020 — at the precise moment the pandemic shuttered restaurants worldwide — and transformed the business by shifting its focus from diners to restaurants as the primary customer. Under her leadership, OpenTable has achieved double-digit revenue growth in 2025 and quadrupled its share price since she joined, while forging strategic partnerships with Visa, JPMorgan Chase, and OpenAI.
Nina Herold
Nina Herold is the CEO of Reed & Mackay, a Navan company, leading one of the most storied names in luxury corporate travel as it merges with the technology platform that acquired it. Previously COO of Navan (formerly TripActions), she built and scaled the travel side of a hyper-growth fintech-and-travel SaaS company through a pandemic, an acquisition spree, and a market-defining pivot into expense management.
Jing Liu
Jing Liu is the Founder and CEO of SIMO (formerly Skyroam), the AI-driven cloud connectivity platform that lets devices roam across 300+ mobile carriers in 145+ countries without a physical SIM card. She founded the company in 2008 in Silicon Valley, pioneered patented virtual SIM (vSIM) technology, raised $63.5M in funding including a $20M Series C2 in 2019, and has built SIMO into a platform serving over 15 million users and 6+ million connected IoT devices. Under her leadership, SIMO extended its reach from travel hotspots to enterprise IoT, automotive, and mission-critical connectivity.
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.
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.
Hussein Fazal
Hussein Fazal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Super.com, a financial super app serving everyday Americans with savings, credit building, travel bookings, and cashback rewards. Previously, he co-founded AdParlor, a Facebook ad optimization platform acquired by AdKnowledge in 2011 after scaling to $100M+ in revenue. At Super.com (formerly SnapTravel), he has grown the platform to 30+ million users and $200M+ ARR, raising over $261M in total venture funding, with backing from Steph Curry, Harley Finkelstein, and institutional investors including iNovia Capital and Lion Capital.
Tasneem Amina
Tasneem Amina is the Co-Founder and President of Kindred, a members-only home-swapping platform that lets people exchange homes without exchanging money. Born in South India and immigrated to the US at 14, she studied Biology at the University of Chicago before pivoting into finance and tech. After stints at Goldman Sachs, Yik Yak, and Stitch Fix, she became a product leader at Opendoor - where she grew a business line from $0 to ~$300M in annual volume. She co-founded Kindred in 2021 with fellow Opendoor alum Justine Palefsky after a week locked in a cabin whiteboarding ideas. Kindred has since grown to 300,000+ members and 300,000+ homes across 150+ cities, raising $148M total with a $125M round in February 2026 led by Index Ventures.
Chris Wilson
Chris Wilson is the Chief Executive Officer of Grasp Technologies, a Dublin, Ohio-based company that has been the backbone of travel data management for corporate programs and travel management companies since 1996. He brought 28+ years of enterprise software sales and leadership experience to the role when he joined in June 2024, having previously scaled revenue at Hazelcast (six years as CRO) and PSPDFKit (two years as CRO), and earlier built high-performing sales teams at Oracle, Skytree, and Magnet Systems. Based in Los Altos, California, Wilson is known for his go-to-market expertise and his vision for Grasp as a platform at the intersection of travel data consolidation, virtual payments, and AI-ready analytics.
Hannah Greenberg
Hannah Greenberg is the CEO of Eleven Software, the cloud-based Wi-Fi authentication platform powering connectivity for 25,000+ hotel properties across 140+ countries - processing over 10 billion authentications per year for brands like Hilton, Marriott, Accor, and Wyndham. She acquired Eleven in 2022 through a search fund she built after her MBA at UC Berkeley Haas, then led the 2023 acquisition of UK-based Airangel to create the world's leading hospitality Wi-Fi management company. A Cornell Hotel School alumna with roots in PwC consulting and $1 billion in hotel development at Seaview Investors, Greenberg brings the rare combination of an owner-operator's instinct and a technologist's ambition to one of hospitality's most infrastructure-critical categories.
Dayo Esho
Dayo Esho is the Co-founder and CEO of TravelJoy, a San Francisco-based SaaS platform that serves as an all-in-one operating system for independent travel advisors. Raised on the front lines of his mother's travel agency, he built TravelJoy after interviewing 50 travel agents and confirming a near-universal set of pain points: too many spreadsheets, too little time, and no software built specifically for them. Since launching, TravelJoy has grown to facilitate over $1 billion in annual customer spend, raised a $10M Series A led by Acrew Capital in March 2024, and deployed an AI-powered Itinerary Copilot that is reshaping how travel advisors create and sell trips.
J. Scott Zimmerman
J. Scott Zimmerman is the CEO and co-founder of Xola, a San Francisco-based SaaS platform that powers booking, back-office management, and marketing for tour and activity operators worldwide. A licensed physician who completed a neurology residency at Stanford, Zimmerman chose Stanford precisely for its proximity to Silicon Valley, coding in Python during spare hospital moments - sometimes until 2am - while simultaneously building the company that would become Xola. He founded Xola in fall 2011 after recognizing that real-time technology had transformed flight, hotel, and car rental reservations, but the $135 billion tours-and-activities market remained largely undigitized. Backed by investors including Rakuten Travel, Michael Burry (of 'The Big Short' fame), and Google Analytics co-creators Scott and Brett Crosby, Xola has grown to serve thousands of operators across North America, Western Europe, and beyond.