Folio
Headquarters: Durham, North Carolina
CEO: Kate Adamson
Website: Folio
Founding date: 2023
Investment: $20M publicly announced
Pictured (L to R): Co-founders Al Hertz and Kate Adamson
Folio is a financial operations platform that helps properties turn back-office complexity into competitive advantage with a modern, agentic, all-in-one procure-to-pay solution. Their suite includes: Folio Buy: centralized, managed procurement; Folio Inventory: fast counting and asset accounting; Folio Bills: AI-driven invoice processing; Folio Pay: streamlined payments via virtual card, check, and ACH; and Folio Expense: P-cards and corporate cards purpose-built for hospitality. Two and a half years post-launch, Folio is on track to power over a thousand hotels and a billion and a half dollars in annual purchasing volume.
PhocusWire coverage:
Below, we asked co-founder and CEO Kate Adamson to share strategic priorities for 2027 and lessons that have been learned since founding.
Strategic goals for 2027
Next year, the Folio team will remain on the Folio mission: make excellent hospitality effortless. At Folio, we believe hospitality extends beyond hotels. All commercial operations that involve humans taking care of other humans, and offering food, beverage, lodging or services, are ultimately hospitality businesses. We appreciate how all hospitality operations can benefit from the automations, workflows and tools the best operators in hospitality have helped design in Folio. Additionally, our strategic focus continues to be delivering the greatest possible savings and value back to our customers and properties. To do so, we will continue to invest in supercharging Folio with more agentic capabilities, so it can become more interactive, helpful, and entrusted to perform even more actions for our users.
Key lessons learned since founding
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is to trust your process. Sustainable growth doesn’t always mean going faster or rushing. We spent a lot of time investing in infrastructure, listening to operators and choosing the right partners before trying to scale. Similarly, we probably over-invest on deep implementations relative to other providers, because we find it means better product performance, faster portfolio-wide rollouts and fewer ongoing connectivity headaches. Having a stronger foundation allows you to scale faster in the future. I’ve also learned that great technology only matters if people actually adopt it. Staying close to on-property users, building alongside them and focusing relentlessly on making their jobs easier has shaped nearly every decision we’ve made.
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