Levee - Global Startup Pitch Seedup Winner: Al Lagunas, Founder & CEO @ The #Phocuswright Conference
Summary
Al Lagunas, Founder and CEO of Levee, delivers the Global Startup Pitch Seedup Winner presentation at the Phocuswright Conference, pitching Levee as a data platform built specifically for hotel operations. Lagunas opens with a vivid scenario illustrating the core problem: a housekeeper on hour ten of her shift discovers a broken toilet and faces an impossible choice between properly filing a maintenance ticket through a cumbersome manual process or simply going home to her family. He argues that frontline hospitality workers want to do their jobs well, but the industry has been left behind by technology — and critically, the foundational data infrastructure required to apply automation, robotics, or AI does not yet exist in hotel operations.
Lagunas introduces Levee's wedge product: a multimodal inspection agent delivered via smartphone. After a housekeeper cleans a room, they scan the space in real time using the Levee app. The AI verifies brand standards compliance, item counts, and inventory against pre-configured standards the hotel itself defines — including uploaded brand standard videos, SOPs, and inventory checklists. This allows housekeepers to move efficiently to the next room while enabling early guest check-ins and ensuring quality assurance at scale.
The pitch emphasizes that the room inspection is only the entry point. The data captured during inspections unlocks downstream automation across training and development, inventory management, procurement, and team performance analytics. Levee can identify top performers for recognition and retention, flag struggling employees for targeted training interventions, and generate bespoke coaching content based on specific deficiencies observed during inspections. The platform also automates ticketing workflows, meaning issues like broken toilets are routed to the right department without manual intervention.
On business impact, Lagunas frames Levee's value proposition around achieving the hospitality industry's 'holy grail': simultaneously raising product quality — rooms delivered to higher brand standards — while reducing operational expenditures and labor waste at the property level. He identifies labor cost as the number-one line item on hotel balance sheets, noting that supply of workers is not growing, making workforce augmentation the only viable path forward.
Lagunas closes with a personal note: the housekeeper scenario he described was drawn from his own childhood, as his mother worked as a hotel housekeeper. He positions Levee not just as a technology play but as a mission to build a central operating system for all hotel back-of-house and frontline teams, enabling them to work more effectively alongside AI and robotics as those technologies mature.
Key Takeaways
- •The foundational data infrastructure needed to apply AI, robotics, or automation to hotel operations largely does not yet exist — Levee is building it.
- •Starting with a multimodal room inspection agent is a strategic wedge: it solves an immediate pain point while generating the data required for broader automation.
- •Hotels should let frontline teams define quality standards (brand videos, SOPs, checklists) and embed them directly into AI verification tools rather than relying on manual supervisor checks.
- •Labor cost is the top line item on hotel balance sheets, and with workforce supply not growing, augmenting existing staff with AI tools is the most viable path to operational improvement.
- •Raising product quality and reducing labor cost are not mutually exclusive — room inspection data enables both simultaneously.
- •Capturing granular per-room, per-employee performance data enables targeted rather than generic training, addressing specific weaknesses identified through real work observation.
- •Automated ticketing triggered by inspection data eliminates the manual bottleneck that causes maintenance issues to go unreported, especially during understaffed shifts.
- •Retaining top-performing frontline workers requires identifying them through data and offering clear recognition and career development pathways.
- •Hotel technology platforms should be customizable at the property level to reflect each hotel's unique brand standards and workflows.
- •The inspection layer is an entry point, not the end goal — the real value accrues from the downstream workflows and analytics the captured data enables.
Transcript
Hi everyone, my name is Alagonis and before I tell you more about Levy, I want to explain to you the problem that we're solving for. So I want us all to imagine that we are a housekeeper working at the Grand Hyatt and you're on hour 10 of your shift and you're on hour 10 of your shift because the hotel doesn't have enough staff to help you. You are cleaning a room. You're on the 12th floor and you come across a broken toilet. Now you have two options. You can fill out a ticket, jump in the eleva...
