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 finish to finish 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 quicker, 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 spfinish 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 vfinishors can accelerate distribution.
- Expansion into voice/phone and pre-arrival/upsell automation increases ARPU.
Threats
- Incumbent vfinishors adding “AI features” and bundling into existing contracts
- Fast-shifting AI landscape; expectation gap if vfinishors 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 attempting to alleviate from both the customer and the indusattempt perspectives?
Customer (guest) pain points
- Slow responses, inconsistent answers across channels, having to repeat yourself
- Low personalization despite being a returning guest
- Friction in modifys/requests (late check-out, upgrades, spa bookings, policies)
Indusattempt (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:
- Win reference properties in high-volume segments (resort/spa, city hotels, groups) and document measurable ROI
- Expand within groups via chain agreements and structured rollout plans
- Partnership distribution with PMS/booking/tech providers and hospitality consultants
- Founder-led enterprise sales for strategic accounts, plus scalable outbound for indepfinishents
- 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 necessary 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 receive stuck and why guest communication still finishs 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 finish of that pilot in May 2024.
Since then, we’ve been obsessive about listening to the indusattempt and our customers: shipping directly into live hotel environments, measuring outcomes and iterating quick based on real usage. The strongest validation has been operational adoption, once the system is integrated and starts reshifting repetitive work, hotels create 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 indepfinishent 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 create money?
We already create 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 becaapply 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 focapplyd 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 finishless 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 creating an impact. Why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?
We’re not selling “nice-to-have” software. We’re reshifting a measurable operational bottleneck that every hotel feels daily. The ROI is direct (hours saved, quicker responses, fewer missed bookings), and deep integrations create defensibility and retention.
We also have early proof: Hotels are live, applying 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 consider 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, shifting from “automation of inquiries” to “automation of the guest journey.”
What is your finishgame? (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.
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