ALICE, a mobile platform for guests to engage with hotel services and staff to manage all requests, has secured $3 million in seed funding. The financing was led by hospitality industry insiders Tishman Realty Principles and the Founders of NeueHouse. Other investors in the round include 645 Ventures, a new VC founded by Nnamdi Okike, a former principal at Insight Ventures, as well as the founding team of Seamless Web: Jason Finger, Todd Arky and Paul Appelbaum.
ALICE was created in 2013 after its founders experienced consistent frustration with the low-tech methods that hotels used to receive and handle guest requests.
“We started as a mobile concierge platform for guests, but quickly realized that there is an equivalent, if not greater, need in efficiently managing the fulfillment of that request,” said Alex Shashou, co-founder and president of ALICE. “Placing the request was easy, but managing its lifecycle was surprisingly complex. Specifically, most hotel departments work across multiple systems that are not connected; therefore, we set out to create a single platform to deliver a more streamlined solution.”
Leveraging the combined experience in hotel management and financial technology (FinTech) at some of the world’s leading financial institutions, ALICE team members created the first mobile service-on-demand platform in the hospitality industry. The platform allows guests to discover and request hotel amenities and services from their digital devices, while increasing the property’s operational efficiencies through a robust back-end task management and analytics platform. The request begins with a guest’s mobile device and ends on the staff mobile device, giving ALICE complete domain control to ensure quality fulfillment.
Leading hotel groups including Shangri-La’s Hotel Jen, Bespoke Hotels, The Setai, The Gansevoort Group, Standard Hotels, and Sixty Hotel Group currently use the ALICE platform to deliver uncompromised service to their guests.