In The Big Chair - Vivi Cahyadi Himmel of AltoVita

How did you come to found AltoVita? What gap did you see in the marketplace?

My co-founder [Karolina Saviova] and I launched the platform in January 2018. At the time we had a very simple mission, which was to standardize and provide quality assurance to alternative accommodation, like Airbnb or serviced apartments. But after testing many different channels, we saw it was the corporate clients, relocation clients who truly resonated with our quality control protocols. We found our product-market fit within what we call the legacy corporate accommodation market. Then during the pandemic, we were still fresh in the product-market fit. We had some early adopters, relocation companies.

We understood that business travel was shut, but saw employees of Global 2000 companies were still relocating their employees around the world ... so we focused on this go-to-market over the past two years.

The first five years of my career were in finance and investment banking. I was actually lucky a couple of times moving for my previous employer from New York to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to London. Throughout the journey, I felt hugely valued, but when we did the research, we saw that the system was broken. The backend was really nonexistent. PDFs, emailing, spreadsheets were still prevalent. So we built a scalable API-first infrastructure that allows really fast integrations with many PMSs and channel managers, bringing very rich, scalable content in connecting the team.

We work with the likes of Rentals United, Guesty and others to have accumulated corporate accommodations. We also pair it with what we call four-tier quality control, which includes ensuring operators can deliver hospitality services and have the right management protocol. We also investigate every single property before they're listed online in our client-facing interface. We also have a proprietary pre-inspection, so every check-in will have a geotech report of how the apartment looks. We have a very exhaustive list of questions that have to be answered by every hospitality operator, so that if there's any issue, they're able to be more proactive and handle it in advance. Lastly, we do a quarterly performance measure and review with every single hospitality operator. That combination has been a proven recipe for success.

In our view, the AltoVita position is crystal clear. If you want to live like a local, take some risks, then perhaps Vrbo or Airbnb could be the right choice. ... For a longer stay, quality assurance, safety compliance, duty of care, then it's AltoVita, and this is really what our brand represents: corporate accommodation, and the platform for employees globally.

How has the pandemic exposed the need for tech-focused solutions in corporate housing? As a tech-first company, how was AltoVita positioned to capitalize in this space?

We are three to four years post product-market fit. Of course, every day, every second, every hour, the market positioning continues to be fine tuned. But the need for tech solutions in corporate housing has been long overdue. Even obviously before the pandemic, not just for booking and securing accommodation - it's beyond just the booking journey, and also all the work that goes behind the scenes by the travel buyers, travel managers, mobility managers and relocation managers, and that is around budgeting, cost forecasting and policy creation. The pandemic pushed it further. When it happened two years ago, you heard words like how do you demonstrate cost containment, transparency, accountability, data-driven duty of care, and how do you leverage an infrastructure that will be able to eliminate human error? So allowing humans to do the human thing. Then the second thing is employee choice. Traditionally corporate accommodation options are really limited to just three or four options with like 40 hours, 48 hours of manual intervention. I had a fabulous experience, but I didn't know that for each booking, it would take up to two days of my new work.

We have to streamline that, and we are able to deliver that within minutes. Even further with our core/flex product, we have built in a policy creation that would enable employee choice, but at the same time be mindful of their employee level, family and location. Family size is so crucial because when you are sending people for business travel, it's just that one individual. But if you're sending employee for relocation, it often affects your family, their pets and everything else. We built this logic that would enable employees to have employee autonomy and flexibility, but at the same time takes this into account, particularly when it comes to the family size.

Lastly is around the richness of the content. Corporate accommodation safety is so paramount. Sustainability values are next, more than GDS. Ultimately, AltoVita is the future of GDS. I think we are moving away from that blue screen to very intuitive, rich content platform technology that is able to communicate with many different systems. That allows us to be very fast, efficient and aggregate content from our supply chain that will enrich the demonstration of many different facets of the content, with safety, accessibility, pet-friendly, family-friendly, sustainability.

How has AltoVita grown over the past year, and how are you looking toward future growth? Are you looking to fund raise?

Exactly two years ago, basically we were all confused. My co-founder and I, we sat down and as much as possible cut our costs to the minimum. ... So we said let's globalize AltoVita, because before the pandemic we were limited to Europe. A lot of property operators were losing bookings anyway, and they had time. We were bringing in different, niche clientele, so that has been successful. The second thing we did was to revitalize our technology. We had an MVP and used the pandemic to continue staffing our engineering resources. We built the second generation of the platform that allows fast integrations with many other systems.

So how have we grown? We went from nine employees to 45, we globalized AltoVita from 400 locations to 1,238 locations. We tripled our traction in 2020 and quadrupled last year when many travel companies were forced to either hibernate or shrink their workforce. We also grew our customer based by 525% year-on-year.

Fundraising, yes, we have a very supportive network of angel investors. Recently a family office joined our cap table. We have those investors that have been supportive and have been backing us up all throughout the pandemic. We're gearing up now for a larger fund raise this year, hopefully. I think all the efforts that we have done during the pandemic will open a floodgate of traction because just this year we've seen a month-on-month growth of 20%. If we continue the same traction, I think we will be able to exit beautifully by 2026.

On the growth end, you recently appointed Jessica Land as head of client partnerships and named Tara Scrivener global accounts manager. How do those hires reflect AltoVita’s commitment to diversity and inclusion?

Diversity and inclusion, while growing up, I sort of understood what it was. I never truly understood what it meant until perhaps, the past three to four years. I was fortunate enough to have a family where there was equality and I had many beautiful opportunities to have people who believe in me and have the resources and skills and education to help me excel. But as I spend more time in my career, I find that successful women are still the exception, and I see more and more women struggle as they mature. We want to commit ourselves to empower women who can empower other women, and even more so when we see the situation in Ukraine, Russia, where women, instead of focusing on their career, had to be flooding the borders and giving birth in train stations.

I think we are in a very privileged position to be able to be discussing the pay gap, diversity and inclusion. So for the very little that we can do, we want to continue empowering women, promoting from within, giving them the right mentorship, access to opportunities. More importantly, we want to ensure that both male and female are compensated equally, that we can be proud to be able to report on our diversity.

What roadblocks remain in elevating women to leadership positions, and how can the industry move past them?

It all starts with a conscious decision not just to say it, but actually be accountable to demonstrate your decision. I think for us in this case is to be able to take calculated risks when it comes to employee progression and then helping them to accelerate their careers and look from within, which gives them a good opportunity to excel within their respective role and do it consciously and even share it to the industry.

At the end of the day, we can create a safe environment to empower our female leaders, to leverage their experience, use their creativity and imagination and find their voice so that they can embrace their roles and responsibility.

I mentioned earlier mentorship, and even to the extent family support, this is something that I still don't have the answer to, but it's something that I would like to continue researching and investigating - how to truly enable women to be on the same pay level as men when it comes to child support. Especially for single women, because childcare is so expensive, oftentimes probably as expensive as the salary. That's the fundamental reason why women step back.

This is something I'm deeply passionate about, I'm bringing a lot of research to it. And when we have the answer, this is a policy we would like to publish at some point, hopefully this year, to be able to concretely support women in childcare.

What advice would you give to women considering a career in travel or technology?

I think that mentorship and also reverse mentorship programs would be great. I say reverse mentorship, what does that mean? For me, I've been in my career for 20 years and there are many others who are fresher from university or have maybe five to 10 years of experience. I find that I constantly learn so much from my younger colleagues. They have the mental capability and mental resources that I don't have. And they come up from a very fresh perspective and are able to be resourceful in using the right technology, which I don't have. I personally feel like this is a mentorship to me more than anything else.

The point here is to advise younger women to continue learning and self-educating, because that's one way to ensure that you're ahead of the game. Lastly, which I think has been powerful for the growth of AltoVita is building an ecosystem of fans, early adopters, investors who believe in your vision, but at the same time you must be able to demonstrate accountability.

Can elaborate on AltoVita's sustainability efforts?

Last year as part of our open innovation summit, what we've done is develop what we call modular filter technology. It's modular because we can very easily add or remove amenities and different sections. We did that with the pet filter. This was during the pandemic; pet relocation went up by 50%, almost all our requests were related to pets.

The second thing was around safety and security. We added this section, which can very easily filter for smoke detectors, for example, and due to our scalable infrastructure, we're able to do that just within a few clicks. Of course the product development takes longer than that, but essentially you have a section dedicated just for safety, security. Also late last year, because there was a greater emphasis on sustainability, we added our modular filter technology to a sustainability section, where again, you're able to sort very quickly those properties with green energy. This year, we want to take safety and sustainability to a whole new level. On the safety level, we are partnering with Breezeway.

They're specialized in operation management and have taken safety to a different level. What ultimately we will do is integrate with Breezeway, ensuring the two systems can communicate and then not only have a safety section, but also have a safety certificate or safety-reviewed evidence containing questions as well as pictures, geotech images of the relevant section, i.e., smoke alarms.

On the sustainability side, the same with safety, it can be filtered. On the property cards, you should be able to see which properties have safety evidence and also a sustainable practice. In an ideal world, we want to also show carbon emission per night, but I think this is due to a limitation in data and also lack of awareness within the supply chain. We see this as a phase two, phase three. But the dream is to have this on the property card and have carbon emission as a way to sort the data. What we plan to do is essentially bring in a sustainability practice section where you can view all the sustainable practices of this particular property, again, backed by geotech images and video.

What's next for AltoVita?

We are on a mission to build the largest corporate accommodations inventory in the world. Our formula, which is the four-tier quality control and our API-first technology paired by human touch, is proven. We have many happy early adopters of AltoVita, such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the U.S. government.

I think we're onto something, and given my background in investment banking, I'm really clear about AltoVita's exit strategy. We keep an open mind for any attractive M&A offers. We've received a few already from our legacy accommodation as well as relocation partners. If we do our job right, we should be able to fetch the best valuation by IPOing.