The hotel and hospitality business is fickle. It's not always easy to train new employees how to do their jobs and interact with guests, and the industry is often disrupted by high turnover and strikes.
While such issues aren't always apparent to customers, Cristina Imperial Carl — founder and CEO of Austin-based startup Ediphi — learned about the ever-changing dynamics from the inside.
She and her husband owned three restaurants in the Philippines.
"We thought going back to the Philippines after 20 years of experience here in the U.S. would be a little bit easier, since we were starting our family at that time," she said. "And that wasn't easier, of course. But what we learned was that people were hungry for training."
Interns would frequently ask them how to develop a career in hospitality and go abroad. So they started a training program in the midst of the pandemic, and by May 2021 they they were off to the races. It grew from seven students to 450 in a year. By the end of 2022, they had 6,000 trainees joining them on Zoom and Google Classroom to add skills.
The couple moved to Austin but continued to run the program. Around that time, Carl invested in Austin-based startup Virtuix, which makes an omni-directional treadmill for exploring virtual reality worlds. That helped her start to think about how VR might be incorporated into hospitality training, especially for hard-to-replicate scenarios such as earthquakes or fires, which can often create chaos in a hotel setting.
"So without knowing what I was thinking of or getting into I said, 'let's build a demo,'" she said. "I called it a demo. I didn't know to call it an MVP (minimum viable product) because I didn't know the lingo yet."
It turned out that a bootstrapped startup with an MVP was good enough.
"Our sales team didn't know enough not to sell an MVP," she said. "So we sold it, and they liked it, and we were off and running."
The startup lingo and skills came quickly. She was accepted into Capital Factory's accelerator in Austin and then the Techstars Boston accelerator — both of which supplied mentorship and early-stage funding to help create more learning modules and expand the team.
Now, Ediphi, co-founded by COO Vanessa Jopillo, is dashing into its next phase. It's focused on expanding its client base in North America and has already partnered with JW Marriott and Hyatt Regency.
The young startup said Sept. 4 that it has raised a $1.5 million funding round led by a group of investors that includes Tripadvisor co-founder and former CEO Steve Kaufer, investors Pixel Perfect Ventures, Allied VC and Techstars.
"Their vision and tech are impressive, and they’re setting new standards in the industry," Kaufer stated.
Ediphi's VR platform, which can operate in almost any language, simulates hotel settings and includes training for routine work, as well as emergency preparedness, including hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, basic first aid and more. Its AI-powered trainer, Yumi, also helps guide trainees through potential career paths and suggests future roles that they might consider to rise in the ranks and boost their salaries and responsibilities.
The startup, which has an office at Capital Factory as well as teams in Slovenia and the Philippines, has about 20 employees.
"The problems in hospitality aren't new, Carl said. "But this is definitely a tool that can truly help from the employee side, but also the employer side, to learn how to work together to get people the careers they're looking for and be more fulfilled."
