Sunny Ray talks with Aakarshan Saxena, founder and CEO of Markoni, an AI native short-term rental chain built to operate like a hospitality brand rather than a booking tool. Saxena, an IIT Delhi computer science graduate, explains how an earlier experiences marketplace idea got pushed aside after Airbnb launched a competing feature, sending him to Mahakumbh, a gathering that drew hundreds of millions of pilgrims. There he manually managed around 150 properties and 100 staff by phone and WhatsApp, generating $50,000 in revenue while learning that hospitality is chronically understaffed and driven mostly by communication and coordination. That experience, including a harrowing overnight rescue during a deadly stampede, shaped Markoni's approach of using AI as an actual manager rather than a simple assistant. The company now automates reservations, dynamic pricing, staff supervision and vision based inventory checks, cutting management costs to about a third of traditional providers while charging owners roughly 10 percent instead of 20 to 35 percent. Saxena still runs about 100 of his own listings to stay close to the product and is preparing to raise a seed round while targeting a million dollars in revenue within 90 days.
He ran 100 rentals by phone during a deadly stampede, then built AI managers to do the job for a third of the cost.
Take us right into the deep end. What are you building, and what's the problem you're solving?
We're building an AI native short-term rental chain, a hospitality brand and property management company like Marriott or Hyatt, but for short-term rentals. I personally managed 150 properties by hand at Mahakumbh, coordinating with 100 caretakers and cleaners on WhatsApp. We learned that hospitality is understaffed and most of the work is just communication and coordination, so we built AI to act as the manager, not an assistant.
100 properties and a thousand guests run by hand on almost no sleep. Can you walk me through one of those nights?
During Mahakumbh I hadn't slept in three days when I had to get an 80 year old man and his son across a bridge at 3am, carrying a 45 kilo wheelchair on my lap on the back of a motorbike. It took 45 minutes to cross a 50 meter bridge. We reached the safer riverbank right before a deadly stampede broke out on the other side.
What was the exact task you were doing at 2 in the morning that made you think a machine should be doing this?
Honestly, no machine could have done the physical rescue work, but what could have been automated was all the phone calls, messages and staff coordination, that was most of my job. On my own Airbnb it used to take me one to two hours per room handling guests and staff. After using Markoni, that dropped to one to two minutes per room because the AI decides when it needs me.
Traditional managers take 20 to 35 percent, you guys take 9.9 percent. What exactly did you have to automate to make that math work?
In traditional hospitality a cheap housekeeping staffer needs a supervisor, then a manager, then a general manager on top, stacking costs almost tenfold above the base salary. We automated that middle management layer with AI, including a vision model that checks room photos against inventory and flags missing items like plates or a remote, so we can invest that saved cost into a better guest experience.
Where does AI genuinely beat a good local property manager, and where does it still lose badly?
AI loses badly in highly volatile situations, like Mahakumbh, where the city could close off at any moment and we needed humans stationed at the borders to react in real time. But right now AI can fully handle reservations, concierge, revenue management, accounts, compliance, taxes and staff coordination, including vision based inventory checks that used to be done manually by a supervisor.
Occupancy and nightly rate are the two numbers every owner watches. Which one is easier to move, and why?
Occupancy is easier to move, and nightly rate is actually linked to occupancy. We use AI agents that track corporate events and conferences in a city and autonomously reach out to attending companies offering direct bookings, plus we partner with hospitals for medical tourism. For pricing, the AI adjusts nightly rates every 15 to 20 minutes by analyzing billions of data points.
Can you explain Markoni to an owner with three properties in 60 seconds, and tell me what changes in their first month?
If you rent out three properties yourself you typically get 3 to 4 percent yield, and you pay twice, once to OTAs like Airbnb and Booking.com for discovery and again to a property manager. I'll triple your yield, double your direct bookings, and do it all for about a third of what a traditional property manager charges, taking just 10 percent total.
There's a date inside the next 90 days that matters to you. What has to be true by then?
In the next 90 days our target is to hit a million dollars in revenue, because we're about to start raising our seed round. It's an ambitious goal, but I've done the math and I believe it's possible.
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