SPEAKERS
Founder & CEO
Vibe Adventures (Scaleup – Emerging Markets)
Alex Veka
Alex Veka is the Founder and CEO of Vibe Adventures, a travel-tech company focused on making complex multi-day adventure travel easier to plan and book. He leads product strategy, partnerships, project management, and customer experience, drawing on hands-on experience in travel operations and technology.
About
Vibe Adventures is building the operating and distribution layer for multi-day adventure travel. The platform combines curated small-group trips with flights, transport, and relevant activities to create connected itineraries with transparent final pricing. Its specialized focus is the multi-day adventure niche, where travelers currently coordinate fragmented services across multiple providers. Vibe Adventures helps them discover, personalize, and book a complete trip through one streamlined experience.
Founder
Talk to Magpie AI (Wild Card)
Astha Kalbag
Astha Kalbag believes confidence is the currency of the future, and she is building an AI platform to help customer-facing teams earn it. As the founder of Talk to Magpie AI, she builds an empathy-driven voice AI roleplay training platform for hospitality staff.
The AI platform helps upskill customer facing staff across front desk, sales and events, and F&B teams by giving them a safe space to practice 1:1 guest interactions with an AI coach getting feedback based on tone, empathy, resolution approach.
Before founding Talk to Magpie AI, Astha spent over a decade building and scaling go-to-market functions across major technology companies. She was part of the early team at Skyscanner APAC and later managed $200M growth portfolios at Google, Meta, and Uber, working with over 300 customers across growth marketing, marketing science, and insights-led consulting. She holds an MBA from London Business School.Astha is a vocal advocate for AI for good. She speaks regularly on how AI can unlock humanity’s potential by helping people uplevel themselves, rather than replacing them.
Her work has earned recognition as a Top Woman in AI and Digital, Top 100 CMO, Young Promising Leader, and Digerati Top 50. She has spoken internationally at DigiMarCon, Futr Conference, TERN, Connect-e-com, and AdWorld, and hosts the podcast Europe on the Bull.
About
Talk to Magpie AI is a voice AI roleplay simulator for hospitality teams. The AI platform helps upskill customer facing staff across front desk, sales and events, and F&B teams by giving them a safe space to practice 1:1 guest interactions with an AI coach getting feedback based on tone, empathy, service recovery and upselling.
The platform has 100s of scenarios that simulate guest interactions, grades you on conversations and gives you access to a coach that will help you elevate the quality of guest interactions. Further, by uploading your property’s SOPs you also can speak to an AI coach that will guide you through navigating difficult customer interactions. Talk to Magpie AI was incubated at London Business School and is part of the ElevenLabs and Claude for Startups programs. The experiential learning voice platform is scaling rapidly with 20+ customers with 200+ properties.
CEO & Founder
OneJourney (Scaleup – Wildcard)
Brian Dass
Brian Dass is the CEO and Founder of OneJourney, a disruptive embedded payments and automation platform purpose-built for hospitality, travel and mobility. As a three-time hospitality tech founder, he has spent over 30 years doing what most founders in this space have only done one side of: both running hotels and building the software they run on to simultaneously maximize both efficiency and profitability.
Dass cut his teeth as a General Manager at some of New York City’s most respected luxury and boutique hotels before founding Timeless Hospitality, which was acquired by TravelClick and is now Amadeus Hospitality. He later founded Open Hospitality, a global booking platform that grew to serve thousands of hotels across more than a hundred countries before its acquisition by Pegasus Solutions, and is now part of Cendyn. Combined, the technology platforms he developed have generated billions in booking revenue for hoteliers worldwide.
The common theme running through every company Dass has built is that hotels only pay when they earn. His booking engines operated on a pure pay-for-performance model, earning a small commission on bookings the platform actually delivered, with the website, digital marketing, and conversion tools bundled in.
Today at OneJourney, he is applying the same operator-first principles to hospitality fintech; turning hotel payments from a cost center into a new source of income, with AI automations included and zero fees to the hotel. For more information, visit one-journey.com.
About
OneJourney is an embedded-payments company built for hospitality. Its flagship platform, SwiftPay, turns the payments hotels already make — to suppliers, vendors and partners — into incremental revenue and automated savings, at no cost and no added risk to the property. By combining virtual commercial cards, supplier payment workflows, AI-driven invoice and reconciliation automation, cashback on eligible spend, and transparent reporting, OneJourney gives independent hotels ownership of a payment layer they’ve historically left to others.
OneJourney is operated by Hotel Direct, LLC (d/b/a OneJourney and Swift Services), based in Miami Beach, Florida.
Co-founder & CEO
SPUN Global (Seedup – Asia Pacific)
Christa Sabathaly
Christa Sabathaly is the Co-Founder and CEO of SPUN Global, a Southeast Asia-based startup building AI-enabled visa infrastructure for the global travel industry. Prior to founding SPUN, Christa was at Google Indonesia, where she led growth initiatives for over 100 SMBs across Southeast Asia as Country Sales Principal. Her earlier roles spanned across brand, digital, and commercial functions in FMCG, e-commerce, and tech. An avid traveller who has visited 45+ countries, Christa brings a firsthand understanding of the visa friction that inspired SPUN. Outside of work, she serves as a board member of Jalin Mimpi, a Bali-based NGO focused on providing free education and building learning centres across Bali and Sumba Island.
About
SPUN Global (www.spun.global) is building the most intelligent visa infrastructure in Southeast Asia, starting with Indonesia, the region’s largest outbound market. By embedding automation and AI-native workflows into fragmented visa and permit processes, SPUN eliminates friction without changing user behaviour. From document handling to form autofill, SPUN creates a system of record that gets smarter with every application, turning a notoriously painful industry into one that is instant, digital, and scalable.
Founded in 2024 by Christa Sabathaly and Dilla Anindita, SPUN has processed thousands of visa applications within its first year of operation, maintaining a 99% approval rate across a paying customer base. The platform supports 400+ visa types across 90+ countries, serves over 200 travel agents and resellers, and is embedded into major Southeast Asian travel platforms including Klook, Traveloka, Tiket, and Trip.com. With a strong wedge in B2C and growing traction in B2B2C, SPUN is on track to become the default infrastructure layer for mobility and global compliance across emerging markets.
Founder & CEO
1-CP (Scaleup – Europe)
Eric-Jan Krausch
Eric is a B2B entrepreneur and digital pioneer with 15+ years of experience in building innovative software solutions. As CEO of 1-CP (1-Click-Procurement), a fintech simplifying corporate payments, Eric is on a mission to bring B2C convenience to B2B transactions. Enabling employees and AI agents to purchase on any site with instant, autonomous compliance, embedded expense and payments.
Previously, Eric founded and successfully exited Acomodeo, a leading corporate accommodation broker. Having raised over €10M in funding, he scaled Acomodeo to become a global provider for over 40 multinational corporations (including 5 DAX companies) and forged deep integrations with industry giants like SAP, Amadeus, and Booking.com.
Eric also brings diverse experience in media, telecom, and consulting, including independent CTO/CPO roles in the hospitality and payment sectors. He holds a Bachelor’s in Digital Innovation Management (Mannheim) and an Executive Master in Digital Pioneering from Zeppelin University and the University of Cambridge.
About
Our vision: 1-Click-Procurement™
1-CP is a “Corporate PayPal” that integrates B2B functions (profile, reporting & expense, corp. payment) into merchants’ B2C channels so employees and companies can buy seamlessly and directly from the supplier, without complicated processes or expensive intermediaries. Starting in the business travel space soon.
Founder & CEO
Crewfare (Scaleup – North America)
Jason van Esso
Jason van Esso is the Founder and CEO of Crewfare and has led the company’s growth into a travel technology platform supporting hundreds of thousands of travelers and major organizations across sports, music, entertainment, and tourism. Jason began his entrepreneurial career in travel while attending the University of Miami, where he founded his first travel company at 18, and has since spent his career building technology and businesses at the intersection of travel and live experiences.
About
Crewfare is a travel technology company building the operating system for group travel. Founded in 2021, Crewfare provides an end-to-end platform for events and organizers to manage and monetize travel at scale. Through one connected ecosystem, Crewfare powers hotel sourcing and contracting, room block management, staff and talent accommodations, and attendee travel packages. Today, the company supports travel technology for more than 300 of the world’s largest live events and organizations across music, sports, entertainment, and tourism, including Lollapalooza, NHL, Formula 1 Miami, On Location, and Forbes.
Co-founder
Conxi (Wild Card)
Mo Mbarek
Mo is a hospitality fanatic who loves being greeted by humans at Hotel lobbies. He believes that AI in hotels not about adding chatbots, but rather about freeing humans from excel sheets and allowing them to do what they do best: hospitality. Mo is a 26 year-old entrepreneur based in Singapore with experience in ai-native property management. He is also a Computer Science graduate from Yale-NUS College.
About
Conxi is making an AI brain for hotels. It understands the hotel context, uses its existing software the same way an employee would, coordinates its staff and does work end-to-end. Conxi handles the tedious, so that your staff can focus on hospitality.
Founder
BookAfrica (Seedup – Emerging Markets)
Nana Kankam
Nana Serwah Kankam is the founder of BookAfrica, a travel-tech platform digitizing Africa’s long-tail tourism and experience economy through trusted inventory, right-sized supplier tools, and global distribution. She previously led business operations and strategy at Fandom, a private-equity-backed digital-media company with 350 million monthly users, and has advised multinationals, indigenous market leaders, and high-growth startups across emerging markets, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. Nana also sits on advisory boards that connect African creativity to global markets, including Christie Brown (luxury fashion), Rele Gallery (contemporary art), and the Africa Soft Power Project (creative-economy advocacy).
About
BookAfrica is building the operating and distribution layer for Africa’s travel experience economy, helping local operators become easy to discover, trust, book, and pay. The platform combines structured onboarding, verification, payments, and localized payouts to turn fragmented local supply into bookable inventory for global travelers and travel advisors. Led by founder Nana Serwah Kankam and a pan-African team, BookAfrica is live in Ghana with plans to expand across the continent.
CEO & Co-founder
Lobby (Seedup – Lobby)
Romy Abbrederis
Romy Abbrederis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Lobby, winner of Phocuswright Europe’s Global Startup Pitch and just raised a $2.2M pre-seed round led by Founderful VC. Growing up in a hotel in Liechtenstein before moving into software engineering for banks, Romy combines deep operational understanding of hospitality with a technical background in automation and AI systems, and still ships production code as a CEO.
About
Lobby is the AI platform automating complex bookings for hotels and travel businesses. It superpowers sales & reservation teams — increasing conversion by 15%, cutting response times by 75%, and giving agents 2 hours back per day. Lobby has already processed hundreds of thousands of requests and raised a $2.2M pre-seed round led by Founderful, with GetYourGuide Founder Pascal Mathis on the board, and is rapidly expanding with hotel groups across Europe.
Two notes: I added “and still ships production code as CEO” to the bio since it’s a genuine differentiator and speaker bios benefit from one memorable hook — cut it if you’d rather keep it strictly formal. And the award credit sits in the bio rather than the profile; if the form’s company profile is what gets printed more prominently, you could move it there instead.
Founder & CEO
BizTrip AI (Seedup – North America)
Tom Romary
Tom Romary, Founder and CEO of BizTrip AI, is a travel industry entrepreneur and the former founder of Yapta (acquired by Coupa in 2020). Romary founded BizTrip AI in 2024 on a mission to transform business travel through machine learning and AI. Prior to BizTrip, Tom was founder and CEO of Yapta. Romary was VP of marketing at Alaska Airlines and prior to that was VP of marketing at Fogdog Sports, VP of product management at Real Networks and a product manager at Electronic Arts. Romary has a mechanical engineering degree from Duke University, and an MBA from Harvard University.
About
BizTrip AI is designed to simplify and enhance corporate travel by introducing intelligent solutions that benefit frequent business travelers, corporations, Travel Management Companies (TMCs), and Online Booking Tools (OBTs). The agentic AI technology is currently being trialed by large enterprise organizations, including Moderna, as well as Colorado-based TMC, Cain Travel, enhancing traditional search-based booking tools with an astute, perceptive interface that understands travelers’ preferences, anticipates their needs, and ensures policy compliance.
The platform serves as a personal concierge for business travelers, delivering insightful, personalized experiences, while optimizing management costs by allowing travel planners to chat directly with an automated personal assistant. Instead of searching through hundreds of results on flights and hotels, BizTrip AI uses historical data and preferences to anticipate traveler needs, and deliver relevant, tailored options for air, lodging and ground transportation that are compliant with corporate travel policy.
This modern experience will improve adherence to corporate policy, reduce booking leakage and reduce agent-touched transactions. BizTrip AI can achieve up to 8% in travel cost savings – including up to 4% through persistent price tracking and re-shopping, and an additional 4% through reduced fees, employee time savings and decreased leakage. The product also provides employees with a seamless travel and planning management experience, leading to higher satisfaction and productivity.
