About us
Kokum Labs is small, deliberately. We built the platform so that two people can do the work a ten-person agency would bill you for — and so that the person you talk to is the person who can fix it.
Why we built this
Independent properties are not losing to better hotels. They are losing to better distribution. The place down the road with worse rooms and a worse view takes more bookings because it replies in four minutes, its listing is current on six channels, and it asks last year's guests to come back.
None of that is hospitality work. It is software work — and it is the kind of software work we have spent our careers doing. One of us spent years at Amazon building systems where latency is measured in milliseconds because milliseconds cost money. The other built payment infrastructure at Billdesk, where money moving correctly, every time, is the entire job.
The tools sold to independent properties today are either enterprise software scaled down badly, or agencies charging a retainer to do things a machine should be doing. We thought there was a third option: build the machine, and run it for you.
Kokum is the fruit of the Konkan coast — sharp, unmistakable, and quietly essential to everything it goes into. That felt about right.
The team
Co-founder — Product & Engineering
Spent years at Amazon building systems where a slow page or a failed request costs real money at real scale. Brings that same standard to a 12-room homestay: your guest should never wait, and nothing should ever quietly break.
Co-founder — Payments & Platform
Built payment infrastructure at Billdesk, where money moving correctly is the entire job. Owns everything in the platform that touches a rupee — deposits, staged payments, refunds and reconciliation.
How we work
Small teams can afford to have principles, because there is nobody to blame when they are broken.
There is no support tier. You message us, one of the two of us replies, and it is the same person who can change the code.
Speed is the whole advantage. If a reply takes an hour, the booking is already gone. Everything we build is measured against that.
Every message the AI sends on your behalf is visible to you, in full. Nothing happens to your guests that you cannot see.
Your guest list, your booking history, your content. If you ever leave, you take all of it with you. No hostage-taking.
If your property does not need us, we will tell you on the call. A customer who should not have signed up is worse than no customer.
Deposits, staged payments, refunds and reconciliation are built by someone who spent a career in payments. This is not a spreadsheet.
Say hello
Bring the sceptical ones. We would rather answer them now than have you find out later that we were not the right fit.