Announcing Our Seed: Building the AI Workforce for Hospitality

Lance raised a $5M seed, led with Y Combinator and SV Angel, plus angels from OpenAI, Expedia, and the Johnson Family / OTO Development. The bet: hotels are the original AI use case, and the operating system should be a 24/7 workforce, not a phone tree. Three production systems are already in hotels: Lance Live (voice), the sales email agent, and operations / the daily manager report.

Hotels are extraordinary businesses. A modest 100-room property handles thousands of guest interactions a week — wake-up calls, housekeeping requests, late check-ins, lost room keys, dinner recommendations, group inquiries, maintenance issues, pre-arrival questions, post-departure folios. Each interaction is small. Together, they are the entire experience. And yet most of these interactions still happen the way they did in 1985. A guest dials zero. The phone rings at the front desk. A staff member, already mid-checkout, picks up. A note gets written down. A radio call goes out. Sometimes the request makes it to the right person; sometimes it gets lost in a shift change. Email goes to a shared inbox no one truly owns. Group inquiries languish for days. Maintenance tickets live in three different systems. The result is a structural problem the industry has lived with for decades: the people closest to the guest are the most overloaded. Front desk agents context-switch hundreds of times a shift. Housekeeping leaders spend their day chasing rooms instead of running them. General managers find themselves answering emails at 11pm because the day was consumed by interruptions. The labor that gets squeezed is the labor that creates the guest experience.

Lance started with a simple question: if we were designing a hotel today, from scratch, with the AI tools that exist in 2026 — what would the operating system look like? It wouldn't look like a phone tree. It wouldn't look like a shared inbox. It wouldn't look like an IVR menu that asks the caller to press 4 for the spa. It would look like a workforce — autonomous, multilingual, available 24/7 — that knows the property, knows the guest, and knows the systems. It would pick up on the first ring. It would understand the question. It would do the work. That's what we've spent the last year building. Not a chatbot. Not a single feature bolted onto a PMS. A new layer of infrastructure for hotels — a layer where agents handle the conversational and operational work that humans were never supposed to do.

Lance today is three production systems working in concert, deployed in real hotels handling real guests. The first is Lance Live, our voice agent. It answers the hotel's main line in under a second, handles the call end-to-end, and routes anything it can't resolve to the right department with full context — not a cold transfer. In production, Lance Live is taking calls in multiple languages, booking wake-up calls, dispatching housekeeping and maintenance requests, and answering the questions that make a hotel feel like home — pool hours, parking, breakfast, the fact that the hot tub closes at 9pm on Sundays. When a guest needs a human, the handoff is instant and the receiving team gets full context.

Group sales is one of the highest-margin and worst-served workflows in hospitality. A wedding planner sends an inquiry. A corporate travel manager asks about a 40-room block. The response time at most hotels is measured in days. Lance's sales email agent reads every inquiry the moment it lands, drafts a tailored response with the right rate, the right cutoff date, the right group concessions, and submits it for a one-click human approval. Approved replies go out in minutes — not Monday morning. Conversations stay threaded. Pre-arrival checklists, upsell campaigns, and group briefs run on the same rails.

The third surface is operational: schedules, work orders, preventive maintenance, readings, announcements, multi-language messaging — the full back-of-house. Lance generates next-week labor schedules tailored to forecast occupancy and the rules of each property. Every morning, supervisors at every Lance hotel get a briefing email with last night's calls, today's arrivals, the labor plan, and anything that needs their attention — and they can reply in plain English to ask follow-up questions.

Three things are true at the same time, and we don't think they'll be true together for very long. Voice models finally crossed the line. The latency, naturalness, and reasoning of modern speech-native models is — for the first time — indistinguishable from a human on the other end of a phone for the kinds of interactions a hotel handles. Two years ago this was science fiction. Today it's a config file. Hotels are short on people. Post-pandemic staffing levels never came back. The industry is operating 10–15% leaner than 2019, with no realistic path to hire its way out. Every hotel we've spoken with — luxury, select-service, full-service, independent, branded — is making the same tradeoff: which guest interactions don't get answered today. The integrations are finally accessible. The systems hotels run on are opening up, and AI agents can now operate the ones that aren't. The integration tax that killed every previous attempt at hotel automation has finally been paid down enough that a small team can ship real things. The window is now. We intend to use it.

“Lance operates in a completely different league. It now handles the majority of guest interactions and successfully completes a large share of requests end-to-end — including the complex, cross-system ones.” — Reggie Kumar, General Manager, AC Hotel South San Francisco We're not going to pretend the work is done. We've taken hundreds of thousands of calls and we've made every mistake you'd expect to make: agents that talked too long, transfers that fired too late, FAQs that retrieved the wrong fact, an accent it didn't know how to handle, a phone tree we misconfigured at 2am. Every one of them taught us something. Every one of them shipped a fix the same week. The only way to build for hotels is to live in them. We have. We will continue to.

We are deeply grateful to the investors who backed this round. The seed was led with participation from Y Combinator and SV Angel, alongside an extraordinary group of angel investors from companies that have shaped the product, the AI, and the hospitality worlds we operate in — including operators and leaders from OpenAI, Expedia, and the Johnson Family / OTO Development, one of the largest hotel development companies in the United States. They didn't just write checks. They've sat with us through real product decisions and pushed us to think bigger about what AI agents that run hotel operations actually look like. Having operators of OpenAI's caliber next to leaders of one of the country's biggest hotel portfolios is a uniquely Lance kind of cap table — and it reflects exactly the bridge we're trying to build. We're equally grateful to our customers — the hotels who trusted us early, who let us put a brand-new system on their main line, and who kept saying yes when we asked for one more pilot. You are why this works.

The seed funding lets us do three things. One — go deeper on the agent surface area. Today Lance covers voice, email, and operations. Next is in-stay SMS, pre-arrival outreach, post-stay recovery, and full coverage of the long tail of guest moments. Every interaction the front desk does today, an agent will be able to do tomorrow — and the front desk will become the team that handles the hardest 5% with the time and attention they deserve. Two — go wider on integrations. Every hotel is a tangle of systems: PMS, POS, key card, BMS, energy, laundry, parking, F&B, group sales, revenue management. Lance will speak to all of them. We'll keep using APIs where they exist and computer use where they don't. Three — and most importantly — hire. The fastest way to take Lance from where we are today to where we need to be is great people. We're hiring across the board — engineering, deployment, hospitality, design, go-to-market — and we'd rather hire one extraordinary person than ten reasonable ones. If you've ever wanted to ship AI products that real people use tonight, that change real businesses, that show up on a real phone line at 2am — this is the place. We move fast. We work on real problems. We answer to real customers. The product gets better every week and you can see your work show up in a hotel within days of writing it. Open roles live on LinkedIn. Apply.

The hotel of the future has a workforce that never sleeps, speaks every language, knows the property cold, and frees up the human team to do what humans do best: take care of people who are far from home. We're early. The product gets better every week. The customers we serve are extraordinary, the team we're building is a privilege to come to work with, and the work itself is — finally — possible. Thank you for being part of it. — Caleb & the Lance team