Startup Stage: Altek AI wants to use AI to improve hotel guest communications

Altek AI

The Norway-based company was founded in 2024 by Kristoffer S. Pedersen and Jon-Fredrik Hopland.

Last month, the startup announced it raised $500,000 in a funding round led by StartupLab. 

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Altek AI is building the autonomous AI layer for hotels. We automate guest communication end to end across email, web chat, social messaging, SMS/WhatsApp and voice [and are] deeply integrated into hotel systems like PMS and booking engines, so hotels can deliver faster, more personal service with fewer resources.

We’re live in 37 hotels across Norway, Sweden and Denmark, growing approximately 26% MoM with approximately $140,000 ARR, and we’ve just raised $500,000 in a round led by StartupLab to scale across Europe. We give time back to hoteliers so they can focus on the guests.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Business: Hotels spend enormous [amounts of] time and money on repetitive guest inquiries and manual coordination across channels. We sell a subscription platform to hotels and groups that reduces workload, improves response times and increases conversion/upsell.

Technology: Our platform combines omnichannel messaging, hotel-specific knowledge and deep integrations (PMS, booking engines and other hotel systems) to let AI agents resolve guest requests, not just answer questions. Integrations and self-learning create high switching costs and enable real automation.

Give us your SWOT analysis of the company.

Strengths

• Deep integration approach enables real actions (not just replies) and high switching costs
• Strong early traction: 37 hotels live across three countries, rapid iteration speed
• Clear pain point with measurable ROI (time saved, response time, guest satisfaction)
• Compounding advantage: data and learnings improve automation and personalization over time

Weaknesses

• Integration work is demanding and can be a bottleneck.
• As an early-stage team, we must be disciplined about focus and product quality.
• Hospitality is relationship-driven; sales cycles can be variable by segment.

Opportunities

• Massive global market: hotels are under cost pressure and staffing constraints
• AI adoption inflection point: from assistive tools to autonomous workflows
• Chain rollouts and partnerships with system vendors can accelerate distribution.
• Expansion into voice/phone and pre-arrival/upsell automation increases ARPU.

Threats

• Incumbent vendors adding “AI features” and bundling into existing contracts
• Fast-moving AI landscape; expectation gap if vendors overpromise/underdeliver
• Regulatory and data/privacy requirements across markets
• Competitive noise from shallow chatbot providers creating skepticism

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

Customer (guest) pain points

• Slow responses, inconsistent answers across channels, having to repeat yourself
• Low personalization despite being a returning guest
• Friction in changes/requests (late check-out, upgrades, spa bookings, policies)

Industry (hotel/operator) pain points

• Huge manual workload in email/phone/messaging that pulls staff from on-property service
• Fragmented systems and data silos leading to inefficiency and mistakes
• Staffing shortages and turnover, training costs, service quality variability
• Missed revenue from slow follow-up and limited capacity for upsell

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

We’re executing a land-grab playbook in Scandinavia and Europe. The core is:

1. Win reference properties in high-volume segments (resort/spa, city hotels, groups) and document measurable ROI
2. Expand within groups via chain agreements and structured rollout plans
3. Partnership distribution with PMS/booking/tech providers and hospitality consultants
4. Founder-led enterprise sales for strategic accounts, plus scalable outbound for independents
5. Product-led retention and expansion: Once we’re integrated, we become mission-critical and expand into more channels/workflows.

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

We started by interviewing several hotels to understand where the real operational pain sits: inquiry volume, staffing constraints, where requests get stuck and why guest communication still ends up being so manual.

That led to a pilot project in early 2024 with a large spa resort outside Oslo, Norway. During the pilot we built and tested four different AI solutions in real operations. Seeing what worked, and how quickly hotels adopted it when it actually reduced workload and improved response times, was the moment we realized the potential and clear product-market fit. We incorporated Altek AI at the end of that pilot in May 2024.

Since then, we’ve been obsessive about listening to the industry and our customers: shipping directly into live hotel environments, measuring outcomes and iterating fast based on real usage. The strongest validation has been operational adoption, once the system is integrated and starts removing repetitive work, hotels make it part of their daily workflow.

Market-wise, guest communication is a universal function across hotels globally, and it’s becoming more complex as channels multiply and expectations rise. Our addressable market includes independent hotels and hotel groups with meaningful inquiry volume, especially those running modern tech stacks where integrations can unlock real automation. We see a large, multibillion global opportunity when you combine digital guest communication, automation and the AI-native guest profile layer that powers personalization across the entire guest journey.

How and when will you make money?

We already make money: We charge hotels a recurring subscription, typically priced by property size. We expand revenue over time with additional channels and integrations. The model is straightforward SaaS with strong retention because integrations and a system that continuously learns embed us into operations.

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

We’re two technical founders from Norway who built Altek AI while studying computer science at the University of Tromsø. We launched in May 2024 and signed our first paying customer a month later.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

As an early-stage company, we’ve focused on building an inclusive culture from day one: structured hiring, clear role expectations and a workplace designed to welcome diverse backgrounds. As we scale, we’ll actively recruit across networks beyond “founder circles,” and we’re prioritizing diverse candidate slates for every role.

On the product side, we build for accessibility and multilingual guest communication, a core inclusion issue in hospitality.

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

Choosing focus. Hospitality has endless edge cases and a fragmented tech landscape, and it’s tempting to chase every integration and feature request.

The hardest part has been staying disciplined: building an AI platform that’s customizable, scalable and doesn’t require a lot of work to set up, without compromising reliability for hotels.

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

We’re not selling “nice-to-have” software. We’re removing a measurable operational bottleneck that every hotel feels daily. The ROI is direct (hours saved, faster responses, fewer missed bookings), and deep integrations create defensibility and retention.

We also have early proof: Hotels are live, using it daily and expanding usage. Add the timing, hospitality is finally ready to adopt AI beyond experiments, and we believe we’re positioned to become the core layer rather than just a tool.

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

Twelve months from now we expect to have significantly increased the number of live hotels through group rollouts and expansion outside the Nordics, with a stronger presence in Europe and an initial U.S. footprint.

Product-wise, we’ll have deeper system integrations, more autonomous workflows and broader channel coverage, moving from “automation of inquiries” to “automation of the guest journey.”

What is your endgame? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

Our ambition is to build the global core AI platform for hospitality—a durable, category-leading company. We’re building for long-term scale: expanding internationally, owning the guest communication layer and becoming an essential part of hotel operations.

In the long run, an IPO is a plausible path if we execute, but we’re open to acquisitions as well, as long as it strengthens the platform and market leadership.