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DigiStayOct 2024 – PresentBengaluru / Dehradun

Building India’s first AI-native PMS

AI-native Property Management System for independent hotels - one platform replacing 3–4 legacy tools across front desk, housekeeping, reservations, and billing.

AIPlatform0→1Leadership

Role

Co-Founder & CPO

Timeframe

Oct 2024 – Present

Team

40 people, 2 cities

Scope

Product, fundraising, GTM

Domain

AI-native PMS / Hospitality

Outcomes

0+
~10,000 rooms

Hotels onboarded

0 mo

0→scale timeline

~0%

Front-desk tasks automated

$0

Paid acquisition spend

Context

Independent hotels run on a patchwork of 3–4 disconnected legacy tools - front desk, housekeeping, reservations, and billing rarely talk to each other.

The result is manual reconciliation, slow check-ins, and operators flying blind. The market had no AI-native option built for the way small hotels actually work.

My role

As co-founder and CPO, I owned product end-to-end: strategy, roadmap, discovery, and the agentic-AI surface area.

I also drove fundraising and diligence end-to-end, closing two angel rounds, and built and led the 40-person cross-functional team across two cities.

Approach

Grounded the product in 100+ customer-discovery interviews across three cities before writing a roadmap.

Defined and shipped agentic-AI workflows for guest check-in, ID verification, and operations automation - among India’s first AI-native PMS products.

Drove product-led growth with zero paid spend, running OKRs, sprint rituals, and weekly user research to keep the team tight to real operator pain.

Highlights

Replaced 3–4 legacy tools per customer with one AI-native PMS spanning front desk, housekeeping, reservations, and billing - entirely through product-led growth with zero paid spend.

Artifacts

DigiStay's AI check-in verifying a guest ID on a phone, on the street at night.
Agentic AI check-in and ID verification, live on the ground at a hotel.
Two DigiStay teammates working on a laptop at a car boot during field onboarding.
On-the-ground onboarding - running the product from the field across the hills.
Manthan presenting DigiStay.ai at the AI Impact Summit, on stage with a panel.
Presenting DigiStay.ai - the AI Hotel Manager - at the AI Impact Summit, Uttarakhand.
DigiStay's first four founding members together at night.
The founding four - the day tech, product, design, and sales came together.
The full DigiStay team in matching hoodies on a rooftop at dusk.
The 40-person team that scaled DigiStay to 300+ hotels.
Early DigiStay roadmap review in the first office.
First roadmap reviews in the early, scrappy office.

Results

Scaled 0→300+ hotels (~10,000 rooms) in 12 months, replacing 3–4 legacy tools per customer with one AI-native PMS.

Automated ~50% of front-desk tasks through agentic-AI workflows.

Reached 300+ hotels entirely through product-led growth - zero paid acquisition.

Reflection

Discovery depth compounds: 100+ interviews up front made every later roadmap call faster and more confident.

AI is only credible when it removes real operational toil - automation that maps to a front-desk clerk’s day, not a demo.

Let’s talk