Breaking the Hospitality Hiring Crisis: In Conversation with Ayush Soota, Founder of Paathz

As Paathz officially launches globally this month, the AI-powered workforce intelligence and hiring platform is entering the hospitality industry with considerable momentum. During its beta phase, Paathz attracted more than 50,000 hospitality professionals through word of mouth alone, even before posting its first live job opportunity. The early response suggests a growing appetite for new approaches to hospitality recruitment, talent development, and workforce management.

To explore Paathz's vision and ambitions for the industry, Hospitality Net's Henri Roelings sat down with Ayush Soota, Founder and CEO of Paathz. A Glion and EHL graduate with hands-on experience at luxury hospitality brands including Mandarin Oriental and Four Seasons, Ayush brings an operational perspective to the challenges facing hospitality employers and professionals.

In this interview, Ayush discusses the inspiration behind Paathz, how artificial intelligence is transforming hospitality recruitment, and his vision for a more connected, intelligent, and efficient hospitality workforce ecosystem.

The Genesis of the Idea

Henri: Let’s travel back to the very beginning. The industry has been talking about a "labor shortage" for years. But you have famously argued that hospitality doesn't actually have a labor shortage—it has a visibility problem. Take us back to the moment this clicked for you. What was the exact catalyst for Paathz?

Ayush: You hit the nail on the head, Henri. Paathz wasn't dreamed up in a corporate tech boardroom; it was born directly on hotel floors, in the kitchens, the lobbies, and back offices. While working operational roles in luxury properties, I kept seeing the exact same paradox everywhere. On one hand, you had brilliant, deeply passionate frontline professionals whose careers felt stagnant because they were invisible to the right opportunities. On the other hand, HR teams were completely drowning in thousands of irrelevant, unvetted CVs.

The breaking point for me was realizing that the general career platforms we were forced to use—built for desk-based corporate jobs—fundamentally misunderstood how frontline hospitality works. We are a global, highly transient, human-centric industry, yet our hiring architecture was completely broken, fragmented, and analog. I realized that if we didn't build a specialized "talent layer" natively for hospitality, the sector’s workforce instability would just keep spinning out of control.

The Baby Steps, EHL Roots, and Finding Co-Founders

Henri: Every startup journey starts with a messy first few steps. Once you knew you wanted to fix this visibility problem, how did you take it from an abstract concept into a real project? And importantly, how did you bring your co-founders into the fold?

Ayush: The very first baby steps were essentially just listening sessions. I spent months talking to HR directors, general managers, and line staff to validate that my frustrations weren't isolated.

The turning point for structuring the business came through our deep roots with EHL and Glion. That shared ecosystem is where the foundation of the founding team was poured. I knew that to build something truly paradigm-shifting, I needed a team that possessed both elite hospitality DNA and technical, brand-building grit.

I partnered with my co-founders, Jan Jansen and Luc Minnich. Jan is an alumnus of Glion and EHL who cut his teeth at iconic ultra-luxury institutions like Gstaad Palace and Badrutt's Palace; he understands European luxury operations inside out and handles our operator partnerships. Luc, on the other hand, came in as a seasoned brand-and-growth specialist and the founder of Digital Experience. He became our storyteller, figuring out how to voice this platform to the frontline workers. More recently, we rounded out the core leadership by appointing Pranav Burnwal as our Chief Technology Officer to scale our proprietary AI matching engine. We are a team built by people who have actually lived the problem.

The Paathz Product: Innovation and Competitive Edge

Henri: Let's talk about the actual product because this is where the differentiation matters. If I am a hotel GM or a job-seeking chef logging onto Paathz today, what am I actually interacting with? What is the core innovation here that separates you from general job boards like Indeed or LinkedIn?

Ayush: At its core, Paathz is an end-to-end workforce intelligence ecosystem.

• For Jobseekers: We’ve entirely killed the traditional, text-heavy corporate CV. It’s replaced by a "Structured Hospitality Profile". When a user signs up—even via a simple photo scan of their old resume—our system maps out their verified skill sets, language fluencies, micro-certifications, global mobility desires, and highly specific shifting/scheduling availabilities.

• For Employers: Instead of receiving a flat stack of resumes and hunting for keywords, employers get access to a compatibility engine that pre-ranks talent by real operational, logistical, and cultural fit.

Our absolute competitive edge boils down to two things: Industry-native AI and frictionless workflow integration. Generic platforms treat a corporate accountant and a sous chef the exact same way. We don't. Our AI understands hospitality terminology, talent flow, and operational demand natively. Furthermore, we don't force candidates or managers to leave their existing environments; Paathz integrates right across the hotel tech stack, aligning with the Property Management System (PMS), ATS, and corporate HRIS. Plus, recognizing that hospitality is a personality-driven field, we’ve embedded seamless asynchronous video cover interviews so managers can gauge presence and soft skills before scheduling a formal interview.

Deep Dive: What is "Industry-Native AI"?

Henri: I want to double-back to a term you used earlier that really caught my attention: "Industry-native AI." Tech startups throw the word "AI" around a lot these days, often just wrapping a basic chatbot around generic software. Can you pull back the curtain for us? How exactly have you embedded AI into the architecture of Paathz, which specific models are you leveraging, and what are the unique product features this enables for a hotelier?

Ayush: I am so glad you asked, Henri, because this is where the real engineering differentiation lies. Generic AI models are trained on the whole internet. They understand corporate office environments well, but they don't know the difference between a Chef de Partie and a Sous Chef, nor do they understand how a luxury hotel’s morning room-check flow affects front-desk scheduling.

Our AI is "industry-native" because we have built a specialized hospitality taxonomy layer directly into our processing pipeline. We utilize a hybrid model architecture:

• The Underlying Tech Stack: We leverage foundational LLMs and custom models because of their massive context windows and incredible efficiency at parsing unstructured text, alongside specialized custom models that we have fine-tuned specifically for token classification and semantic embedding of hospitality skills.

• The Training Layer: We didn't just plug into an API. We trained our systems using vast datasets of hospitality operational structures, shift patterns, and regional industry compliance standards.

This specific architecture enables two unique product features that you simply cannot find on a standard job platform:

• The Instant Resume Restructurer (OCR to Taxonomy): A candidate can take a blurry photo of a paper resume or upload a messy Word document. Our fine-tuned vision and text models instantly extract and categorize that data. It doesn't just read words; it recognizes implied skill sets. If a profile says someone worked a high-volume banquet bar at a luxury resort, our AI automatically maps out underlying skills like cross-functional communication, premium beverage inventory control, and high-pressure pacing—even if the candidate never explicitly wrote those words down.

• Automated Structural Bias Filtering: We have built structural guardrails right into our prompt engineering and tokenization layers. Our custom models are explicitly trained to strip out proxy identifiers—such as age, gender, and ethnic naming conventions—and strictly score profiles based on verified operational capabilities, certifications, and structural fit. This keeps our platform strictly compliant with the highest levels of global AI governance, such as the EU AI Act and Singapore's IMDA framework.

When we say "industry-native AI," we mean a system that thinks, categorizes, and filters exactly like an experienced hospitality HR director — just doing it in a fraction of a second.

Biggest Lessons Learned from Inception to Launch

Henri: Moving from a stealth project into a fully scaled ecosystem is a brutal learning curve. Looking back at the timeline between your initial inception to this month's official launch, what would you say was the single biggest lesson learned? Was there a moment where you had to pivot your thinking?

Ayush: The single biggest lesson was realizing how deeply protective hospitality workers are of their time and dignity, and how broken their trust was with traditional tech.

When we started, we thought our primary focus needed to be selling hard to the big enterprise hotel groups first. But when we put the initial MVP out there, we saw this explosive, organic wave of 30,000 professionals joining our database before a single job was even listed. They were actively looking for an alternative because they felt deeply underserved by traditional career infrastructure.

That flipped our perspective completely. It taught us that the talent side holds the real power in solving this crisis. If you build an elegant, low-friction, high-respect experience for the frontline employee, the employers will naturally beat a path to your door because that’s where the high-retention talent lives. We shifted from being just another business-facing enterprise software to being a truly community-first talent ecosystem.

Business Model, Investors, and Financial Growth

Henri: Let’s talk about the business numbers, because our audience includes quite a few hospitality tech investors. What is the underlying business model for Paathz, who has backed you so far, and what do your growth and future equity funding rounds look like?

Ayush: On the monetization front, we utilize a B2B SaaS subscription model tiered by property size and recruitment volume for hotel operators and restaurant groups, giving them continuous access to our matching infrastructure, stack integrations, and talent pipeline. For talent and students, the fundamental platform features remain entirely free, ensuring we maintain an active, uninhibited global talent pool.

Regarding our corporate capitalization: we are currently incorporated in Singapore with a dual operational base extending into Switzerland to give us seamless geographic coverage across APAC and Europe. Our initial capital structure has been anchored by strategic angel investors and private hospitality-tech syndicates who deeply understand the operational pain points we are solving.

Right now, moving past our launch milestone, we are actively executing our Pre-Seed institutional equity round, targeting a raise of approximately $650,000 to $800,000 to aggressively expand our engineering team and fuel our go-to-market rollout across major Asian and European hospitality hubs. We are seeing very strong valuation dynamics because the market recognizes that the global hospitality recruitment spend is a massive, multi-billion-dollar bucket of inefficiencies.

The Link to EHL and its Innovation Hub

Henri: We are sitting here today at the EHL Innovation Hub, and both you and Jan have deep institutional links here. Explain exactly how EHL and the Innovation Center have supported Paathz through this incubation process. How vital is an incubator like this for a modern hospitality startup?

Ayush: It has been an absolute game-changer. The EHL Innovation Hub isn’t just office space; it is a literal launchpad and credibility accelerator.

Throughout our development cycle, the Innovation Center has given us a direct sandbox. It allowed us to pressure-test our AI matching algorithms against academic expertise and real-world hospitality data. They’ve connected us directly with international hotel school networks, giving us an immediate pipeline of graduating elite talent and academic research regarding workforce retention.

More than that, it acts as a premier bridge to the industry. Events hosted here, like the EHL Human X Summit, allow us to sit directly at the table with Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) and global brand operators to discuss how to introduce AI responsibly without losing the human-centric touch that defines hospitality. Having the backing of the world's leading hospitality business school gives a young tech company an immediate foundation of trust that money simply cannot buy.

Conclusion & The Road Ahead

Henri: It’s an incredibly compelling vision, Ayush. By shifting from a simple, noisy bulletin board to a deeply integrated, structured intelligence layer, Paathz is certainly setting up to completely reshape how this industry hires, retains, and respects its workforce.

Before we wrap up, I know there are several regional HR directors, enterprise hotel groups, and potential venture capital investors reading this who will want to get an early look at what you are building. How can hotel groups and potential investors best reach out to you and the team?

Ayush: We love connecting with forward-thinking operators and partners. The easiest way to get in touch with us is directly through our main platform at paathz.com.

• For Hotel Groups & Operators: You can request a live platform demonstration and review our stack integrations directly via the operator portal on the website. You can also reach out to our team at [email protected].

• For Strategic Investors: For those looking to learn more about our current institutional Pre-Seed round, data rooms, and expansion roadmaps, you can connect with me directly on LinkedIn or drop a line to our investor relations gateway at [email protected].

We are moving fast, and we welcome anyone who wants to help us build the future of hospitality workforce intelligence.

Henri: Ayush, thank you so much for your time today, and the absolute best of luck to you, Jan, Luc, and the entire Paathz team on the launch this month!

Ayush: Thank you, Henri! The journey is just beginning, and we’re excited to pave a clearer path for the industry.