vacation-rentals
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Epicurate Turned Vacation-Rental Concierge Chaos Into a Booking Engine - Then Journey Bought It
A former Le Bernardin cook saw luxury concierges running on email chains and memory. Six years later, his provider-first marketplace powered experiences across more than 12,000 homes - and became Journey's route into the moments beyond the room.
RedAwning Built the Plumbing Behind 20,000 Vacation Rentals - Then Travel Stopped
RedAwning promised one connection to every major booking shelf. A pandemic forced it to shrink, refocus, and turn that distribution network into a fuller operating system for hosts.
How a Phuket Startup Became Asia's Ticket to the World
It started with two hotel websites and a tropical hunch that Asia would book its next holiday on a phone. Two decades later, Agoda runs one of the planet's busiest travel marketplaces - and quietly powers the trips you book somewhere else.
Expedia Is Building the Travel Internet Behind the Travel Internet
The familiar booking brands are only the shop window. Expedia Group's more consequential bet is to become the shared infrastructure for travelers, suppliers, advertisers and thousands of businesses that want to sell a trip.
Marriott Vacations Worldwide
Marriott Vacations Worldwide does not run Marriott's hotels. It runs something more intricate: a vacation-ownership machine where branded villas, consumer finance, resort management and a 3,200-resort exchange network turn one holiday into several lines of 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.
Kozystay
Kozystay is a Jakarta-based, technology-enabled short-term rental management company and Indonesia's largest player in the flexible-stay segment. It manages more than 1,000 premium apartments and villas across Jakarta, Bandung and Bali on behalf of property owners, handling pricing, bookings, housekeeping, guest communication and maintenance under a profit-sharing model. Founded in 2019 by Dane Putranto and Frans Winarto, the company reached EBITDA breakeven, raised a Series A in 2025 led by Integra Partners with Intudo Ventures and Cercano Management, and acquired Bali villa manager BaliSuperHost to build a nationwide operating platform.
Travelio
Travelio is an Indonesian property-technology company that runs an online marketplace and end-to-end management platform for apartments, houses and villas. Founded in Jakarta in 2015, it lets landlords hand over units for professional management while giving tenants furnished, standardized homes they can book and pay for daily, monthly or annually - including a rare month-by-month payment option in a market that traditionally demands a full year up front. Often called 'Indonesia's Airbnb,' Travelio manages roughly 15,000 exclusive properties across a dozen cities and is expanding into rent-to-own housing.
Truvi
Truvi (formerly Superhog) is a London-based technology company that helps vacation-rental property managers and hosts screen guests and protect their properties across every booking channel. Its platform combines ID verification and biometric checks, background and sex-offender screening, customizable damage protection of up to $1 million per booking, and a dedicated claims team - letting operators drop traditional security deposits while building trust between owners and guests. Founded in 2019 and led by CEO Humphrey Bowles, the company serves 800+ property managers globally and raised £5.5M in Series A funding in 2023.
Humphrey Bowles
Humphrey Bowles is the founder and CEO of Truvi (formerly Superhog), a London-based risk management platform for the short-term rental industry. After entering the home-sharing sector in 2011, he identified trust, insurance and safety as the biggest barriers to the growth of peer-to-peer accommodation, and built a group of companies - Guardhog and Superhog/Truvi - to close that gap. Truvi provides guest screening, identity verification, damage protection and deposit services to property managers and hosts, and raised a £5.5m Series A in 2026 led by 6 Degrees Capital and Hambro Perks to expand into the US.
Cloudbeds
Cloudbeds is a San Diego-based hospitality management platform that gives independent hotels, hostels, vacation rentals, and lodging groups a single cloud system to run reservations, distribution, payments, revenue management, and guest communication. Founded in 2012 by Adam Harris and Richard Castle, the fully remote company replaces the tangle of disconnected legacy tools that property owners juggle, serving tens of thousands of properties across roughly 150 countries and, more recently, layering in AI through its Cloudbeds Intelligence and Signals products.
igloo (igloohome / igloocompany)
igloo (legally igloocompany Pte Ltd, known to consumers as igloohome) is a Singapore-founded smart access company building keyless, offline-capable smart locks, padlocks and keyboxes plus the cloud software to manage them at scale. Born out of two founders' frustration with handing over physical keys to Airbnb guests, the company's patented algoPIN/algoPass technology generates time-bound PIN codes and digital keys that work without WiFi at the lock. Today igloo serves both consumers and enterprises - through its iglooworks and iglooaccess platforms - across 80+ countries, syncing with Airbnb, Vrbo and hundreds of property-management systems.
KeepingCount
KeepingCount is an industry-focused outsourced accounting and bookkeeping platform that takes the finance function off business owners' plates. Founded in 2023 by Jeff Russell and backed by Housatonic Partners, the company is building vertical-specific brands - real estate, construction, e-commerce, vacation rentals, life sciences, consumer products and professional services - staffed by accountants who specialize in each industry rather than the traditional geography-based generalist model. KeepingCount delivers accounting, advisory (CFO/controller), tax and payroll services on platforms like Sage Intacct and QuickBooks Online, managing more than $250 million in annual client revenue.
Anthony Chow
Anthony Chow is the CEO and co-founder of igloo (igloohome), a Singapore-built smart access company whose Bluetooth locks open without Wi-Fi using time-sensitive PIN codes. What began as an Airbnb host's annoyance over after-midnight key handoffs became a company that has issued more than 20 million digital credentials, sold locks in 90-plus countries, and even sent a batch of locks to space. A data scientist turned hardware founder, Chow trades on a simple, stubborn idea: a world without keys.
Paul Kromidas
Paul Kromidas is the founder and CEO of Summer, a New York short-term rental technology company behind SummerOS, which he pitches as the asset-intelligence platform for vacation-rental owners and operators. A former Airbnb product and strategy lead who helped build Airbnb Luxe, he started Summer in 2021 to make high-performance vacation-rental ownership accessible, then pivoted the business toward SaaS software that forecasts rental revenue and optimizes property performance.
Airbnb
Airbnb is a global travel marketplace that lets hosts rent out homes, rooms, and experiences to guests in more than 220 countries and regions. Born in 2008 from three air mattresses on a San Francisco apartment floor, it turned spare space into a category-defining business, went public in 2020 at roughly a $100 billion valuation, and in 2025 expanded beyond stays into Services and a redesigned Experiences product - positioning itself as an everything app for travel.
Beyond
Beyond (formerly Beyond Pricing) is a San Francisco-based revenue management platform for short-term rental owners and property managers. Its data-driven pricing engine, market insights, booking engine, and OTA distribution tools help hosts and managers grow bookings across 340,000+ listings in 7,500+ cities. Bessemer-backed and led by CEO Julie Brinkman, Beyond has powered billions in booking revenue and is widely viewed as the category's category-definer.
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.
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.