Startup Stage: Aiva wants to help hotels turn guest insights into revenue

Aiva

Hotel technology startup Aiva is developing an AI-powered platform designed to help hotels deliver more personalized guest experiences, increase ancillary revenue and streamline operations.

Founded in January 2026, Aiva connects guest information with hotel services, availability and operational systems, using AI agents to coordinate actions across departments. The company has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Aiva gives hotels the intelligence to anticipate what guests want and the ability to make it happen. Hotels already know a lot about their guests and property, but that information sits across disconnected systems. Aiva connects guest preferences with hotel services, availability and operations, then coordinates the actions needed to deliver the right experience at the right time. For guests, that means a stay that feels more personal and effortless. For hotels, it means opportunities to grow revenue throughout each stay while reducing the manual work behind delivering great service.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Aiva is built for hotels and hotel groups. We help them use what they know about guests to offer relevant services and generate more revenue throughout a stay. Technically, we’re building an intelligence layer that brings together guest information, hotel availability and operational context. AI agents coordinate the decisions and actions needed across hotel systems. Knowing a guest might enjoy an experience is only the beginning: timing, availability and the hotel’s ability to deliver it all matter.

Give us your SWOT analysis of the company.

Strengths: Firsthand hotel management experience, technical expertise and measured results from live deployments.

Weaknesses: We’re a new company in an incumbent-heavy industry. Establishing our mark and locking in key properties will be challenging but rewarding. 

Opportunities: Hotels already have valuable guest relationships and services; better coordination can help them leverage this, generating additional revenue and reducing manual work.

Threats: Established software providers attempting to move from vertical tools towards becoming more horizontal (e.g., from a PMS to an OS). Operators also tend to take a little longer to adopt new tech, which means sales cycles can be slightly prolonged. 

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspectives?

For guests, the frustration is having to repeat a request, wait while departments coordinate or receive suggestions that have little to do with their stay. For hotel teams, even a simple request can involve checking several systems, contacting colleagues and following up manually. Useful information about preferences and spending can also disappear after a conversation. Aiva ensures this lost data is recorded, it connects what a hotel knows about a guest with what it can actually deliver. The aim is more relevant experiences for guests, more revenue for the hotel and less administrative work for staff.

Now that the product is built, what’s your strategy for customer acquisition?

We plan to grow through direct relationships with hotel operators, using our live European hotel chain deployment to show what Aiva does in practice. We want to start with a clear use case and agreed measures of success, then demonstrate value in the hotel’s daily operations. From there, we aim to expand within hotel groups and earn referrals between operators. Our strongest sales argument is evidence that a hotel can evaluate for itself: additional revenue, guest engagement and time saved for staff.

Tell us what process you’ve gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

[Co-founder Lucia Mari Sanguino] saw the need firsthand in hotel management: delivering a great guest experience meant manually coordinating disconnected information, systems and departments. We built Aiva alongside hoteliers as design partners, with ongoing feedback from operators, owners and brands shaping the product. We are now live in European hotel chains, where we’ve recorded a 250% increase in non-room ancillary revenue. Our initial addressable market comprises 187,000 properties, representing an approximate $6.7 billion annual opportunity based on our subscription pricing.

How and when will you make money?

Aiva’s revenue model is a subscription-based fee. We want to adhere to what the industry is comfortable with and ensure we are sitting within those standards. 

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

We’re longtime friends from Ibiza where hospitality is at the very core of what everyone does. Luckily, we hold extremely similar values, with complementary backgrounds. Lucia brings firsthand hotel management experience from growing up in the industry and studied at UCL, with a focus on economics and emerging technology, before pursuing technology management at Columbia. Paula [Rodriguez Jou] is the technical co-founder; she graduated from the University of Surrey in computer science and worked as a software engineer in different roles, most recently centered around cybersecurity. That combination means we understand both the operational problem and the work required to build the technology. Together, we raised Aiva’s $1.5 million pre-seed led by 645 Ventures and Comma Capital.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

As two female founders we have held D&I as a close company value. In an industry that spans geographies, perspectives and more it only becomes that much more important. 

What’s been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

As founders we have the highest conviction about what and how we are building. But we have always held open ears. For us, the hardest part has been balancing conviction while ensuring we are listening to those around us, knowing what to prioritize and making the corresponding hard decisions. 

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact. Why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

The travel space is a hard one to penetrate, but that is what makes it so exciting. Building on the fact that we have the opportunistic timing of the AI era, we also hold a unique approach to how we build. We are not building tech for hospitality. We are building tech from hospitality.

We have lived in this industry for as long as we can remember and our technology reflects that. We are firm believers that most hotel tech was never truly built for hotels, which is why impact has been limited. How we think, how we build and who is in our decision-making circle is centered around making us those lucky ones. 

We’re solving a problem that affects both hotel revenue and the daily workload of staff. Our founders bring hotel management experience and technical expertise, which helps us understand where the product needs to fit into a property’s operations. We also have early evidence from a live deployment: Guests are engaging, ancillary revenue has increased and front-desk time has been saved. The work now is to repeat those results across more properties and over longer periods.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

We aim to leverage our European stance while expanding in alternative regions. Hospitality has no borders and we want to grow Aiva with hoteliers that are ahead of their time. That means refining the product with hotel teams, making implementation easier and measuring outcomes over longer periods. We need to be deliberate about what we build and which opportunities we pursue. A successful year would mean wider adoption, hotels choosing to expand their use of Aiva and stronger evidence of its effect on guest engagement, staff workload and non-room revenue.

What is your endgame?

Our long-term ambition is to take Aiva public. We want to build a company that plays a lasting role in how hotels understand their guests and run their operations, with the scale and foundations to support that ambition. Today, our focus is on building a product hotels rely on, demonstrating consistent value and growing the business.