Aiva uses AI to help hotels connect guest data, anticipate individual needs and create more personalized experiences while improving operations and revenue.
Lucía and Paula, could you introduce yourselves and Aiva and tell us how the idea for the company came about?
Lucía: I’m Lucía, co-founder and CEO of Aiva. I own go-to-market, sales and strategy. I come from a hotel family, studied Economics at UCL, and ran operations at a resort in Ibiza before starting Aiva.
Paula: I’m Paula, co-founder and CTO. I own product, engineering and infrastructure. I’m a software engineer, and I grew up in Ibiza alongside Lucía, so hospitality has been part of my life from the start.
Lucía: Aiva gives hotels the intelligence to anticipate what guests want and the ability to make it happen. The idea came from seeing the gap every day in operations. Guests stay a week and want things, and nobody asks them at the right time. It isn’t that staff don’t care. Nobody has the context or the hours to do it for 400 rooms at once.
You have been friends for many years. What made you decide to become cofounders, and how do your different backgrounds complement each other?
Paula: We’ve known each other for over twenty years. The hardest thing to find in a co-founder is someone you trust completely when things go wrong. We already had that.
Lucía: The split is clean. I’ve been on the operator side. I know what a front desk looks like at 11pm in August and what a general manager will actually approve. Paula is a software engineer who understands this industry because she grew up surrounded by it. That’s rare. She builds for hotel teams with real empathy for how they work, and she turns that into a system that works reliably across messy hotel software. We don’t overlap on who decides what, and that matters as much as the friendship.
Lucía, you previously worked as a hotel manager. Which problems did you repeatedly encounter in the hospitality industry that ultimately inspired Aiva?
Lucía: Three things kept coming up. First, the data wasn’t where decisions were made. The property management system knew who was in-house, but the spa, restaurants and activities each ran their own tools, so nobody could see the whole guest. Second, most of what staff knew about guests was never written down. “The couple in 214 asked about a boat trip.” “This family always eats late.” Those conversations hold the real signal, and they disappear at the end of a shift. Third, whether a guest heard about the sunset cabana depended on who they happened to talk to. So the opportunity wasn’t more software. It was being present in the guest conversation, with context, at the right moment.
Aiva connects hotel systems with guest information. What exactly does the platform do, and what problem are you solving for hotels?
Lucía: 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, 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.
Hotels already work with numerous digital systems and large amounts of guest data. What makes Aiva different from existing hospitality technology solutions?
Lucía: Most hospitality tech falls into one of two groups. Some tools are systems of record that store data. Others are messaging tools that send what they’re told. Aiva sits between them. It decides what a guest should be offered and when, and then makes it happen. We’re measured on outcomes during the stay, not on how much data we store.
Paula: There’s also a structural difference. Every conversation Aiva has creates a record that doesn’t exist anywhere else: what a guest asked for, what was offered, what they bought, and when. That history never existed in digital form before. The more we run, the better we get at anticipating what guests want, and incumbents can’t copy that by adding a feature.
Who are your primary customers today, and what benefits can hotels expect when they integrate Aiva into their existing technology stack?
Lucía: Our customers are four- and five-star resorts that want to move before the rest of the market and grow their margins. They have longer stays and a wide range of things for guests to enjoy on property, so anticipating what guests want makes the biggest difference there. Hotels can expect measurable additional revenue from services during the stay, priced so the return is a clear multiple of what they pay. They also get fewer small requests landing on staff and, for the first time, a clear view of what their guests actually want.
How has Lucía’s hands-on experience in hotel operations influenced the technical priorities and product decisions you make at Aiva?
Paula: It gives us three non-negotiables. First, it can’t add work for staff. If a feature creates a new task for the front desk, it doesn’t ship. Second, it has to meet guests where they already are, which means WhatsApp and voice, not another app to download. Third, it has to integrate cleanly with the property management system. Lucía knows that asking a hotel to change its core system ends the conversation.
Lucía: It also shapes what we choose not to build. We deliberately don’t do room-rate revenue management. That’s a solved, crowded problem, and it isn’t where resorts lose money during the stay.
Building integrations across different hotel systems can be technically complex. What have been the biggest technological and operational challenges so far?
Paula: Hotel systems are fragmented and often old. Every property management system handles data differently, and some barely expose it. Reading data is one thing. Writing reliably, like posting a charge to a guest’s bill, is much harder, and that’s where most integrations fail. We’ve prioritised depth over breadth, so we get one integration fully right before adding the next.
Lucía: Operationally, the hard part is proving value properly. Hotels have been sold a lot of promises. We run pilots with control groups so the results hold up to scrutiny. It’s slower, but it’s the only kind of proof a revenue owner trusts.
Aiva announced a $1.5 million pre-seed round backed by Comma Capital and 645 Ventures. What convinced these investors, and how are you using the funding to accelerate Aiva’s growth?
Lucía: I think three things convinced them. First, a team that has lived the problem from the operator side and can build the solution. Second, a clear starting point with a direct path to revenue, rather than a vague platform pitch. Third, a data advantage that compounds with every hotel we work with.
Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly important in hospitality. Where do you see the greatest opportunities for AI in improving hotel operations and the guest experience?
Paula: The biggest opportunity isn’t replacing staff. It’s covering the gaps between them. Hotels already know what great service looks like. They just can’t deliver it to every guest at every moment. Technology that holds context across the whole stay closes that gap.
Lucía: The longer-term opportunity is data. Hospitality has always run on what staff remember. Once those guest interactions are captured, hotels can understand their guests in ways that were never possible before: what to offer, how to staff, what to build. That’s where it compounds.
What are the next major milestones for Aiva, and where would you like to see the company over the next three to five years?
Lucía: In the near term, we’ll convert our pilots into paying customers with published, controlled results. We’ll go deeper on integrations across the systems our resorts use, and turn what we’ve learned into a repeatable way of working with each new property.
In three to five years, I want Aiva to have closed the gap between technology and hospitality. I want it trusted by owners, operators and brands because it grows revenue and improves operations while protecting what makes this industry special: the experience. We’ve built Aiva from inside the industry, not for it, and that shows.
What are the three most important pieces of advice you would give to founders building a technology company together with a close friend?
Lucía: First, split ownership completely and write it down. Who decides what should never be ambiguous. Friendship is not a governance structure.
Paula: Second, have the hard conversations early: equity, roles, what happens if one of you wants to leave. Do it while it’s hypothetical, because it’s much harder when it’s real.
Lucía: Third, protect the friendship from the company, not the other way round. Disagree hard on the work, and never make it personal.
Image photographer Jo Berrojalbiz
Thank you Lucia Mari Sanguino and Paula Rodriguez Jou for the Interview
Statements of the author and the interviewee do not necessarily represent the editors and the publisher opinion again.
