Announcing our Series A to Power Profitability in Hospitality

Today, we are officially introducing Folio and announcing our $14M Series A, led by Thrive Capital and Construct Capital, with participation from Redseed and SciFi VC.

In 2023, after a decade in fintech, we joined forces to build our own financial products. We happened to love working from hotel lobbies. That’s where it all clicked. We saw guests with high expectations and operators navigating manual, complex processes. We started to ask questions, and the tax on properties became clear. Chefs were juggling staying on budget with rising food costs, general managers were balancing guest experience with oversight, and controllers were chasing clean financial inputs while struggling to reclaim their weekends with their kids. There were too many systems, too little connection between them, and no technology that met operators right where they were—at a busy front desk or back of the kitchen. 

We knew that if they were equipped with better tools, these people and these hotels could thrive. Folio was born.

Today, Folio’s procure-to-pay platform is built to maximize financial outcomes, by better supporting the lives of the people on the ground. Folio’s technology brings hotels, suppliers, and finance systems together in one place. With Folio, the more teams use it, the more they save. Tedious accounting processes? Automatic.

We’re a team of fintech veterans with decades of experience building data and e-commerce products, and we cannot help but see a world where every hotel can turn cost centers into profit and massive competitive advantages.

So how’s it going today? Folio is helping increase profitability for hundreds of hotels with our deep investments in data connectivity. And we work with and design for hardworking hospitality professionals every day. 

Folio powers on-property profitability

We facilitate double-digit cost savings by surfacing discounts, simplifying real-time product comparisons, and reducing overhead.

More discounts: Negotiated supplier contracts can promise up to 25% in savings, but on-property buyers may not be purchasing from them. Folio digitizes supplier catalogs of all kinds to increase on-platform spend. Folio offers features any individual supplier cannot: integrated order guides, streamlined reordering, and Smart Carts that help minimize errors, auto-code spend, manage substitutions, and show available budget.

Folio boosts managed spend at least 10% relative to industry-standard tools. Data suggests that it continues to increase over time.

Real-time price comparisons: Buyers can easily search for and compare products with the same or similar SKU from their approved suppliers, and choose the lower-cost option. The incremental differences quickly add up to significant savings.

Folio drove 6% in savings on top of on-contract buying from real-time product comparison alone.

Fully touchless invoices: A GM at a boutique property once reported they spend 40% of their day coding invoices. With Folio, spend is categorized at purchase and invoice auto-reconciliation agents offer more than just a “3-way-match”, matching across multiple criteria and flagging deviations. For invoices with no match, Folio’s “one click” confirming order reduces the time and cost of processing every invoice.

At one property, 70% of invoices were fully touchless post-purchase, driven by spend categorization at checkout and diligent receiving.

Folio doubles the productivity of hospitality teams while addressing burnout

Same controls, streamlined processes: What once took days now happens in seconds—with all the same controls in place. Before Folio, processing a single payment would take a finance professional 39 steps. Now? Three clicks. These processes were not just inefficient, but demoralizing. We believe properties can maintain, even strengthen, controls without the pain.

The Director of Finance at one property said “I wouldn’t survive without Folio.”

One place for all the info: Without visibility, teams can waste hours chasing answers, making phone calls, slowing decisions and delaying resolutions. One property’s order flowed through 11 people and 6 disconnected systems over several months. Today, it passes through 2 systems in minutes. With Folio, every order is traceable. Teams can instantly drill into budget utilization or focus on the items that need action.

The Controller at another property said “Folio is basically another employee.”

No training required: Other procure-to-pay tools can take 16-20 hours to learn, or require hundreds of pages in learning materials. In high-turnover environments, every hour spent on training is an hour lost in guest experience or staff productivity. Folio’s intuitive design helps new hires get productive in minutes - not weeks.

The top 25% of buyers log in and place their first order in 20 minutes or less.

The special sauce? Connected infrastructure

We are fintech builders who understand the power of modern data infrastructure. Coming from Plaid, we know how better data management can unlock growth. So we’re building Folio as a platform grounded in connectivity as a core product pillar—not a retrofit. Said another way, a hospitality CFO told us “I just want to make sure all my systems talk to each other.” Every seasoned hospitality leader we meet has a tech horror story rooted in integration surprises or outright technology failures.

From day one, we have made foundational investments in building reliable pipes to connect buyers, suppliers, and financial systems. Robust connectivity unlocks usability, speed, trust, and confidence from our users, and improved capabilities, such as:

• Real-time inventory and pricing, so buyers always see what’s actually available

• Reliable checkout agents for faster order placement, with graceful substitution handling

• Quickly import digitized catalogs from key industry GPOs, to ensure buying on contract

• Real-time invoice transmission to some of the top industry ERPs helps power real-time financial reporting and faster payments to suppliers

• Transparency around any issues between systems, with graceful error handling

We are proud of the technology beneath the hood, and even more excited about what this foundation will enable in our next chapter. With the pipes in place, the downstream opportunities are massive: faster implementations, faster reconciliations, better decisions, better results for both buyers and suppliers.

What’s Next

We are growing our highly impressive team. And this is where we brag: that team is our super power. They are experts in product, engineering, and hospitality who show up every day with clever solutions, curiosity, and drive. More importantly: they are good humans; low ego, care deeply about positive customer outcomes, and relentless in their pursuit of better. Just like the people they serve within the industry.

Together, we will be razor-focused on our mission to increase the profitability of the hotels that we serve. Better financial outcomes and financial resiliency in hospitality gets us fintech nerds quite excited.

We believe that when financial operations are done well, hospitality businesses do well. But when financial operations are done with Folio, hotels can massively outperform.

We see a world where hotels can manage and deliver desired outcomes across any dimension through Folio: reduced waste, more value-based buying, reduced carbon footprints, hiring and training folks faster, increased retention, tighter compliance to brand standards, less waste. All in addition to better financial outcomes for operators, managers, owners and even their suppliers. In the age of supply-chain complexity and economic volatility, tools that give an edge are more important than ever.

We’re energized more than ever to continue to serve this incredible industry.

Let’s go!

Kate & Al
Co-Founders