The Beginning
It was a crisp evening in 2024. Arnav Pabhakar, working late at IBM's Bangalore office, had just wrapped up another demanding sprint. He planned a weekend getaway to Udaipur, a chance to disconnect and explore the city's beautiful heritage hotels.
But what should have been simple turned into hours of frustration. Message after message to boutique hotels went unanswered. Some replied the next morning when rooms were already sold out. Others never replied at all. Eventually, they settled for a generic chain hotel "functional but soulless".
"There has to be a better way," Arnav thought. The irony wasn't lost on him, he spent his days at IBM building enterprise AI solutions, yet these small hotels couldn't even respond to a basic inquiry. That weekend, an idea took root.
"Every hotel guest deserves an instant response. Every hotel deserves to capture every booking opportunity. Technology should bridge this gap, not complicate it."
: Arnav's first note, March 2024Finding the Perfect Partner
Arnav dove into research, interviewing hotel owners, studying booking patterns, understanding the pain points. The gap was clear, but he needed someone exceptional to bring the vision to life. Someone who understood both the complexity of AI and the simplicity users needed.
That's when he met Sakshi Sajwan at a tech meetup in Delhi. She was presenting her work on conversational AI, not just impressive technically, but thoughtfully designed for real human interactions. Her background in building scalable systems and her genuine passion for solving meaningful problems stood out immediately.
Over chai at a nearby café, Arnav shared his vision. Sakshi's eyes lit up. She'd experienced similar frustrations booking homestays in Himachal Pradesh. "This isn't just a tech problem," she said. "It's about preserving the soul of boutique hospitality while making it accessible." By the end of that conversation, Innhance had found its CTO.
Building Innhance
Together, Arnav and Sakshi spent months in the trenches, visiting hotels in Jaipur, Goa, Kerala, and Udaipur. They listened to owners juggling reservations on paper notebooks, watched staff struggle with WhatsApp floods during peak season, and experienced firsthand the chaos of manual booking management.
Every line of code Sakshi wrote was informed by real conversations. Every partnership Arnav built was rooted in genuine understanding of hotel operations. They didn't just build software, they built a solution that respects the warmth of Indian hospitality while bringing it into the digital age.
Today, Innhance serves hundreds of boutique hotels across India. But for Arnav and Sakshi, the mission remains personal: ensuring that the next traveler looking for a heritage haveli or coastal retreat gets an instant response, and that small hotel owners never miss another booking because they couldn't reply fast enough.
