Norwegian AI hospitality startup Altek AI has raised €423k ($500k) in a pre-Seed round in order to deepen integrations with hotel systems (including PMS and booking engines), expand its autonomous workflows across more channels, and accelerate growth across Scandinavia and Europe.
The round was led by StartupLab; an incubator, accelerator, and early stage investor for Norwegian technology startups.
Altek AI was among the startups selected to take part in the FutureTravel Summit 2025 (a former sister brand to EU-Startups), an industry event that brings together early-stage travel and hospitality technology companies to pitch their solutions to investors and corporate stakeholders.
“We’re not building another tool that just helps staff write replies faster,” said co-founder Jon-Fredrik ‘Joffen’ Hopland. “We’re building AI agents that can handle a large part of guest communication end-to-end and, where possible, act inside hotel systems. We’re building digital employees.”
Recent EU-Startups coverage shows that Altek AI’s pre-Seed round sits within a wider but highly stratified flow of capital into European hospitality and AI-driven hotel operations in 2025–2026.
At the large-cap end, Amsterdam-based Mews raised €255 million in a Series D this month to expand automation, payments and AI-enabled workflows across hotel operations, while Barcelona-based Amenitiz secured €38.9 million in Series B funding to accelerate AI-led product development for independent hotels.
Earlier-stage rounds point to more focused investments in guest communication and operational automation: Vienna-based chatlyn raised €8 million to build an AI-driven guest communication hub, London-based Inntelo AI closed a pre-Seed round of more than €576k for its AI concierge platform, and Amsterdam-based Toppi secured close to €1 million to scale AI solutions for hospitality businesses.
In parallel, broader tech-enabled hospitality models have also attracted substantial capital, such as Madrid-based Room00 Group, which announced up to €400 million to expand its urban hospitality platform across Europe.
Against this backdrop, Altek AI’s pre-Seed round is in line with other sub-€1 million raises focused on automating guest communication through deeper system integrations, while the overall funding disclosed across these deals exceeds approximately €700 million.
“Hospitality has become extremely complex, and guest communication is still largely manual,” said co-founder Kristoffer S. Pedersen. “Guests don’t care whether they contact a hotel via email, web chat or Instagram – they expect fast, accurate answers and that the hotel knows who they are.”
Founded in 2024, Altek AI is building what it describes as an AI operating layer for hotels: autonomous AI agents that handle guest communication across email, web chat, messaging, social channels and phone.
The company began with direct operator research. Before incorporating, the founders interviewed multiple hotels to map where guest communication breaks down in day-to-day operations.
That led to a pilot project in early 2024 with a spa resort outside Oslo, where the team built and tested four different AI solutions in live operations. The pilot validated that hotels adopt automation quickly when it removes repetitive work – especially if it doesn’t add another system staff have to manage.
The company says it now has 37 hotels live across Norway, Sweden and Denmark. As of January 2026, the company is reporting around €119k ($140k) ARR and ~26% month-over-month growth.
Among its users is The Well, a large spa resort in Norway. Altek AI says its agents have handled 23,000+ messages and 16,000+ conversations over the past year, helping reduce response times on routine guest inquiries and speed up handling of more complex requests.
“Altek AI is tackling a global operational challenge with the ambition to build a new infrastructure layer for hotels,” said Jørgen Veiby, Investment Manager at StartupLab. “The team has shown strong execution and an ability to win paying customers early.”
Hotels are facing a perfect storm: more communication channels, higher guest expectations, and staffing constraints. Altek AI argues that guest communication has become an overlooked operational cost centre.
Based on figures from one customer, a mid-sized hotel can handle about 87,000 guest inquiries per year through email and phone alone. At an average of roughly six minutes per inquiry, that equates to more than 8,700 hours annually – before factoring in lost upsell opportunities and service issues caused by slow responses.
Unlike single-channel chatbots or ‘assistive’ AI tools, Altek AI outlines that their approach focuses on autonomous execution through deep integrations – so agents can resolve requests with context, reduce handoffs, and improve personalisation over time.
Altek AI plans to use the funds to deepen integrations with hotel systems, expand automation across the guest journey, and accelerate growth beyond the Nordics.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/01/oslo-based-altek-ai-secures-e423k-to-expand-autonomous-guest-communication-for-hotels-across-the-nordics/
