The magic of a great hotel stay lies in its effortlessness: fresh linens appear, room‑service trays vanish, and everything just works seamlessly. But behind every five‑star experience is a back office juggling spreadsheets, supplier portals, and late‑night invoice coding to keep things running smoothly.
From furniture and food to replacement light bulbs, every object you see in a hotel first requires a chain of emails, supplier log‑ins, price look‑ups, and spreadsheet edits. Operators bounce between brand standards, group‑purchasing portals, and accounts‑payable systems just to maintain baseline service. It’s slow, opaque, and painfully manual, at a time when hospitality teams are already spread thin.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce we’ve led Folio’s $14 million Series A, alongside Thrive Capital. Folio turns that maze into a single, modern checkout lane, unifying search, ordering, invoicing, and payment in one platform purpose‑built for hotels.
Why It Works
At its core, Folio was built to give hospitality operators the same day to day experience that their guests expect from them: fast, intuitive, and delightful. In practice, Folio is a managed marketplace that unifies the entire procure‑to‑pay flow, from search, to comparison, ordering, invoice capture, and payment, into one intuitive platform designed for hotel operators.
Think of it as a modern checkout lane for a $150Bn+ industry that at best is using 20 year old systems of record, and at worst is writing paper checks.
Hospitality procurement is uniquely challenging because a single hotel juggles thousands of fast-turn SKUs, each with its own vendor contracts, brand standards, delivery windows, and approval flows, leaving operators to stitch together a supply chain that’s as fragmented as it is mission-critical. General managers can spend up to 40% of their week on this process.
Instead of asking suppliers or hotels to change behavior overnight, Folio meets both sides where they already live. Proprietary automations allow Folio to ingest catalog data and place orders without heavy integrations. Hotels can onboard in hours, not weeks, and immediately search 500,000 products across more than 2,000 suppliers.
By replacing clunky punch‑outs with a beautiful UX, Folio cuts out manual coding and approval loops, saving operators 40 hours every week.
The Future of Hospitality
This, however, is just the beginning for Folio’s transformation of hospitality back office operations. As the platform grows, we see a future where hotels trust Folio as a strategic operating system: surfacing the best suppliers, predicting seasonal demand, and handling payments in a single click. Imagine, as a procurement manager, opening up Folio with an optimized cart based on forecast demand, pricing benchmarks, and delivery timelines.
Folio will ultimately be both the operating system and the clearing house for all goods flowing through the hotel industry.
Why We Invested
When we met Kate and Al, they immediately fit our vision for the type of complementary founding team we love to back at Construct.
Al and Kate met at Plaid over a decade ago, where they helped the company scale from 20 people to over 1,000, and helped contribute to the incredible commercial growth during that time. Al was Head of Design, while Kate began in sales and then spent 4 years as a product leader.
They have made a career out of helping users access and use information more effectively and understand deeply what it takes to translate messy real‑world data into intuitive, high‑trust software.
Lastly, since our inception, Construct has sought to back ambitious founders bringing technology to some of our most foundational industries that have been chronically underinvested in and ignored. The core operations powering the hospitality industry have historically been fragmented and unoptimized. In fact, McKinsey and Harvard Business Review ranked hospitality as one of the lowest in digital adoption of 22 industries. By streamlining the discovery to payment experience for hotel procurement, Folio is at heart of the workflows that make the hospitality industry run. We believe Folio can revamp and grow the entire sector from the inside out.
We’re absolutely thrilled to partner with them, alongside Thrive and Redseed.
Most importantly, Folio is hiring. If you’re interested in bringing intelligence to the physical world, reach out!