"Take More Risks," says Tzafrir Blonder, CEO of UpStay

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

Before founding UpStay, I had a very diversified career. I was a commercial lawyer; I had a real estate company in Germany; I then led technological projects for the government and eventually became a VC investor.

As an early-stage startup investor in one of Israel’s leading VCs, seeing all these great innovative companies that pitched their visions to me, I quickly understood that it was about time to found my next company. Then by chance, I met with two of my co-founders who identified a big problem in the hospitality industry and offered a very innovative approach to try and solve it. I liked everything about it – the industry, the challenge, the vision, and most important – my co-founders. It felt like a family from day one, and it became only better as we moved on together.

The rest is history.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

UpStay - The Leading Upgrade Solution for Hotels

UpStay was founded to empower hotels to leverage the rich variety of data points available to them and seize the opportunity to optimize their performance and boost guest experience by utilizing additional products and services throughout the wealth of touchpoints they have with their guests.

What is the origin story?

UpStay was created with the vision to empower hoteliers with data and automation. We saw data-driven e-commerce giants such as Amazon achieving better margins than their competitors. Then we saw OTAs reach great performance with data-driven dynamic pricing and personalization. We also noticed that the airline industry was quick to follow suit and to implement attribute-based pricing and upselling, as well as smart systems that capture more value for both them and their customers. Hotels, however, do not always have the access or the resources to develop data-driven or automations in-house, although they are players who can benefit from such enormously.

Additionally – most innovation in the hotel industry is focused on distribution and operations, but not so much on improving other margin-efficiency points which we identified and decided to tackle for hotels.

This is exactly what we do – We help hotels worldwide to capture real margin driving opportunities with data and automation. Our vision is to turn what we do into an industry standard.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We are a bunch of travel enthusiasts. Like many others, we have spent a significant part of our lives on airplanes and in hotel rooms and always have looked for ideas to enhance our experience away from home.

Our CTO, Jonathan is a data science and software engineering wizard. He began his career in the Israeli NSA equivalent elite technology unit 8200, where he led a research and development team in high-performance computing and machine learning. In his last role, Jonathan served as a senior engineer at Gartner Innovation, leading there a core NLP and ML project. Studied Entrepreneurship and Business Administration at IDC Herzliya, Graduated with Honors.

I am the CEO, and prior to UpStay, I led multinational large-scale technology projects as a senior executive of an Israeli governmental subsidiary. My previous experience also includes founding a German investment company, and working as a corporate and technology attorney in a large Israeli law firm, specializing in M&A, financing rounds and day-to-day legal aspects of technology companies.

I also mentored and invested in early-stage startups as a principal at Emerge, an Israeli venture capital firm. I speak three languages (English, Hebrew, Arabic) too.

Apart from this, the company’s advisors include leading travel-tech entrepreneurs with vast experience in building innovative solutions for the travel industry as well as some of the leading hoteliers in Israel and Europe.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I would probably be building another startup.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

Our model is rev-share based.

We measure revenue per guest. How much money we made for a hotel divided by the number of its rooms.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Here are some milestones & Recognitions:

UpStay was recognized by Oracle Hospitality as an innovative solution for contactless hotel operations.

UpStay is an Oracle Partner Network (OPN) Gold level member. Our solution is fully integrated with Opera PMS to provide our clients using Opera a 100% automated inventory optimization.

UpStay is integrated with WebHotelier, the next-generation hotel booking engine featuring advanced end-to-end Ajax technology.

We were recently selected as finalists among 4000 startups to participate in the South Summit event in Madrid.

We are also 2-way integrated with 15 other leading PMS, booking engines, and channel managers to achieve full automation and zero overhead labor cost for hotels.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

Most exciting for me is autonomous driving since it will significantly change our lives. I am not worried about any technology but sometimes I am worried about the content being created with technologies.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Hacker Noon is designed to help creators monetize content and provide a premium experience to consumers.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Take more risks earlier.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

The coronavirus outbreak slowed down the economic growth of our company as we originally planned it but accelerated other processes, mainly those related to the product and the technology. It also helped us expediting cooperation agreements with our technology partners around the world.

Moreover, since most hospitality businesses will be looking for the best and most valuable tools for recovery, we believe that the awareness of the challenge we are here to solve has increased. Now it’s our responsibility to deliver the best, innovative technology that will help hoteliers get ahead of the competition curve.

As an early-stage startup, we had to apply risk mitigation measures in light of the big uncertainty. That included making several difficult HR choices, but we can proudly say that our team stayed as motivated as before the pandemic and also that it has grown in the last several months. Hence, the vibes are really good right now. Moreover, over the last several months, we have been expanding our team overseas to meet the increasing demand in different parts of the world, which we identified as a unique opportunity for us. We now have team members in Brazil, Mexico, Italy, and Greece, and we are looking forward to expanding our operations in other countries soon.

Vote for Upstay as the startup of the year in Tel Aviv.