As a founder, I often get asked by VCs, customers, and our team: “Why hospitality?” It’s fair—in a world of flashy sectors like fintech or AI enterprise software, hotels and resorts might seem niche or old-school. But by leaning on my past experience along with deep market analysis, customer conversations, and timeless startup principles, hospitality emerged as the ideal launchpad for our infrastructure platform. We built tools to streamline integrations across fragmented systems like property management, central reservations, payments, booking engines, and guest journeys. While we’ve expanded into food & beverage (F&B), retail, and beyond, hospitality was our deliberate starting point—and remains a core focus. Here’s why it made strategic sense, why we prioritized it, and how it enables broader growth.
The Pragmatic Case: Focus Wins in Early-Stage Startups
Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is the startup gospel: Pick a focused TAM of $10-50 million where you can capture 50% share before scaling. Spreading focus thinly dilutes resources, slows product-market fit, and risks spending cash ineffectively. Hospitality fits perfectly—a $5+ trillion global industry, but we targeted mid-market U.S./European chains (20-200 locations) and vendors outsourcing integrations due to domain-specific expertise needs. This gave us two winnable TAMs; one would’ve been ideal, but I’ll explain why two was better.
Our platform is industry-agnostic by design—flexible infrastructure adaptable to any sector or system, but we needed an initial focus. Early on, we learned services atop the platform were essential for solving pain points fully. This combo delivers full-stack integrations at great prices and fast timelines, which has been well-received by enterprises. The reality of this model is that real domain-specific expertise is required for the “whole product” customers demand (another Chasm insight). After evaluating industries, hospitality won—acute pain points, limited internal bandwidth, and growing integration demand.
My experience working on the Oracle OHIP product provided the initial subject matter expertise for this market, which we’ve since scaled through targeted hires and a platform that institutionalizes knowledge. The result is a continuously expanding function catalog with thousands of reusable integration building blocks for core hospitality systems, backed by an engineering team that specializes in hospitality integration patterns. The combination of expertise and our modern middleware platform is our moat, enabling us to deliver the best pricing, fastest timelines, and reliable outcomes. Our customers pay predictable fixed bids for the business impact they want to see, resulting in Poly becoming the glue for critical enterprise cross-system workflows.
Choosing The Right Market
Hospitality vendors cannot deliver their value proposition without integrations. Every modern hospitality product, whether it is a booking engine, loyalty platform, guest messaging tool, or revenue management system, depends on connecting to other core systems that hotels run on, especially property management systems. If a vendor cannot integrate quickly and cleanly into a hotel’s core stack while providing the ability to customize and extend core functionality, they cannot scale adoption and revenue. Integration is a prerequisite for effective distribution.
For hotels, the stakes are different but just as high. Guests expect a seamless experience from booking through checkout. At the same time, staff need to operate efficiently across front desk, finance, food and beverage, spa, and events. When systems do not talk to each other, the burden falls on employees through manual work, which is a drain on resources and distraction from focusing on the guest. Integration is what enables both guest experience and operational productivity.
The challenge for both vendors and hotels is that hospitality stacks are deeply fragmented, and the number of potential integration combinations, from ARI to reservations and payments to accounting and guest tools, is effectively endless. Even within the same segment, implementations vary widely. One group may operate a 10-property luxury portfolio, another a 3,000-room casino resort, and another a 1,000-property international chain. Requirements and expectations differ significantly, even when some of the underlying systems are the same.
This fragmentation shaped our strategy. Rather than attempting to become an expert on every system, we focused on the foundational systems that dominate market share. We prioritized deep partnerships and hands-on projects with leaders like Oracle for OPERA Cloud PMS and Adyen for payments. By working through real implementations with these core platforms, we built expertise around the important endpoints and integration approaches as well as the hundreds of edge cases that slow projects and cause production disruptions.
So why focus on both vendors and chains instead of one or the other? This approach creates a growth flywheel: vendors see our integration work in chains, then pull us into more clients or hire us to help them build out-of-the-box integrations. High-touch vendor rollouts expose chains to our full offering, sparking additional use cases with a direct engagement. This propagation drives our GTM: “Do great work; the rest follows.” We spend $0 on traditional demand gen channels like paid ads and outbound sales—yet struggle to keep up with continually growing demand.
From a VC view, this is defensible: our business KPIs are zero customer churn, 300%+ NDR. These metrics indicate that we’re serving our customers well and that we’re solving real pain in a disruption-ripe sector.
The Natural Expansion Path
Today, we also serve F&B (restaurants, bars, chains) and retail (e-commerce, multi-store) — close relatives to hospitality that face similar challenges: labor shortages, regulatory burdens (wage laws, data privacy, taxes), and cost pressures from inflation and supply chains. In all three markets, innovation is existential and automation is key. Automation starts with digital systems and data, but is inevitably moving into hardware and robotics. I believe these sectors will see a humanoid robot renaissance in the next decade — a wave we are positioning Poly for by becoming the go-to automation and integration partner in hospitality first. As AI-enabled robotics enter these labor-intensive environments, they will need to integrate into enterprise systems, workflows, and training data. The real bottleneck will not be the technology. It will be integration — and that is the layer we are positioning Poly to own.
We’re building F&B/retail competence via hands-on work and strategic hires, leveraging the core patterns and foundation that we have developed for hospitality so that we are ready to support this wave for all three industries.
The People are the Real Reward
Beyond metrics and market insights, hospitality is a rewarding industry to work in. The people are down-to-earth, diverse, passionate—a melting pot from developers dreaming up properties to operators, accountants, security pros, housekeepers, event planners, bartenders, cooks, and entertainers, united by infectious service ethos.
If we were starting all over again, we’d do it exactly the same.