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An entrepreneurial story shaped by early challenges, hard-earned lessons, and a vision for making hotel operations more responsive through AI.
Alexandru Iordache’s entrepreneurial journey began long before he co-founded TheHotelBot. Raised in a small town in Romania, he experienced financial hardship early in life. Those experiences helped shape his understanding of responsibility, security, and the value of building something of his own.
At just 15, Iordache started his first small business, selling false eyelashes. He later explored events and reselling, but his first earnings did not last. Looking back, he says those early experiences taught him lessons about managing money, building relationships, and thinking beyond immediate success.
By 17, he had already moved into marketing and launched his first agency. The road was not straightforward: several early ventures failed, with logistics and partnership challenges among the factors. Those setbacks gave him practical lessons about execution, choosing collaborators, and the realities of running a business.
He later founded TheAdDoctor, which became an important launchpad in his career. According to the available data, during his time in the agency sector, TheAdDoctor generated revenue in the seven-figure range. He has since exited the company completely and is no longer involved in its operations.
Today, Alexandru is investing and is involved in other companies across different sectors, which he prefers to keep private. His current public-facing focus is TheHotelBot, a hospitality technology company he co-founded with Santos Bouza and Bruno Silva.
Finding an Opportunity in Hospitality
TheHotelBot grew out of their experience working together in AI automation after moving away from the marketing sector. As they explored how AI could solve practical business problems, they identified an opportunity in hospitality: hotels communicate with guests across many channels, often around the clock, while staff must also manage day-to-day operational requests.
“Think of it as a staff member who never goes off shift,” Alexandru says, describing the platform’s around-the-clock guest support.
TheHotelBot is designed to handle guest communication through phone, WhatsApp, website chat, and email, 24 hours a day, in the guest’s own language. Guests can use it to ask questions, make or change bookings, request restaurant reservations, or report an issue such as an air-conditioning problem.
Rather than treating each channel as a separate conversation, the platform brings interactions together with shared guest context. This can reduce the need for guests to repeat information and helps route requests to the relevant hotel team with useful details. When a matter is sensitive or requires human judgment, the system can escalate it to staff with a summary of the conversation.
The company also aims to help hotels capture business that might otherwise be missed. For example, the platform can answer calls that go unanswered during busy periods, support upselling, and encourage direct bookings. Reminders can also help reduce no-shows, while the ability to handle routine overnight interactions may help hotels manage service coverage without adding extra night-shift staff.
Alexandru says the cost savings for businesses using TheHotelBot average in the six-figure range per hotel. This refers to savings for hotels, not revenue generated by the company.
Building with a Distributed Founding Team
TheHotelBot’s founding team came together through online business communities and a shared interest in building companies.
Alexandru first met Santos Bouza online through a business community when he was 18. They began working together on an agency, and their professional relationship grew into a close friendship. At TheHotelBot, Santos focuses on partnerships and legal matters and also supports Bruno with product development.
Alexandru met Bruno Silva in the same group when he was 17. He describes Bruno as an experienced industry professional whose contribution has been essential to the product. Bruno focuses on the product side of the business. Their collaboration has become a central part of the company’s development.
Alexandru’s own responsibilities span the commercial and communications side of the company. He works on the logistics of the sales process, marketing and promotional strategy, and business events, while also consulting with his partners as the company grows.
Earning Trust Through Real-World Pilots
For a technology company serving hotels, one of the early challenges is earning trust before a long track record has been established. Hotels are responsible for guest experience, and some may be cautious about allowing a new system to handle incoming calls or guest requests.
TheHotelBot’s approach is to begin with time-limited pilots that run alongside the hotel’s existing front-desk operations. The goal is to let the system demonstrate how it performs with real guest interactions while staff remain available and existing processes stay in place. This gives each property an opportunity to assess the fit before making broader operational changes.
The company has also pursued a partnership-led approach to expansion rather than opening offices in every market. The Stay Collection, an international hotel group, is helping promote TheHotelBot across markets, while the company’s operations team is based in Romania. Within around five months of launch, the platform had reached tens of hotels using or piloting it, primarily independent hotels and boutique groups in Europe. The company is also in discussions with hotel groups in Asia.
One example that illustrates the kind of operational issue the product is designed to address is a large property with around 800 rooms. The hotel approached the team because it was missing approximately five to seven calls each night. TheHotelBot is designed to answer those calls and handle the guest’s request or route it to staff as appropriate. The company has not shared client names or confidential performance data, so this example should be understood as a use case rather than a published measurement of revenue impact.
One Platform Across Guest Communication
Iordache sees TheHotelBot’s breadth of communication channels as an important part of its product approach. While some hospitality tools focus on a single function, such as website chat, voice, or a messaging inbox, TheHotelBot brings several channels together with task routing and a restaurant module. The platform is designed to maintain shared guest context across interactions, and each property can configure its own voice, tone, and supported languages, including Hebrew.
Implementation is intended to take place alongside a hotel’s existing systems, with the setup process typically taking around eight weeks, according to Alexandru. The team works directly with each hotel during onboarding and support, rather than relying solely on a call center model. As with any operational technology, the exact setup and results depend on the property’s systems, requirements, and pilot findings.
A Personal Definition of Progress
For Alexandru, business is closely connected to the life he hopes to build and the people he wants to support.
“Financial independence matters to me, not simply as a measure of success, but as a way to create security for myself and the loved ones, help my family pursue their dreams, and have the freedom to travel and explore,” he mentioned in other interviews.
When asked to describe himself in three words, Alexandru chose “indefatigability, emotional, creative.” The words capture the combination he brings to entrepreneurship: persistence through setbacks, an emotional connection to the people and goals that matter to him, and a drive to find new ways of solving problems.
Looking Ahead
TheHotelBot’s next phase is focused on turning e1arly pilots into broader, multi-property rollouts, particularly with hotel groups and franchises. The platform has been designed with larger, multi-location operations in mind, and the company plans to develop through its partner territories as well as its own sales activity in Spain and Portugal.
For Alexandru, the journey from early experiments in business to building a hospitality technology company has been defined by adaptation. The businesses and roles have changed, but the underlying motivation remains: create useful solutions, keep learning, and build a future that offers more possibilities for himself and the people around him.
TheHotelBot is the current expression of that ambition: an effort to apply AI to the everyday work of hospitality, helping hotels respond to guests across channels while giving their teams more support in managing service and operations.
