Hotel and vacation rental software company Stayflexi announced on Tuesday that it has raised a $1.6 million seed fund. The funding comes from Y Combinator, the famous startup accelerator that Stayflexi spent time in this year, Agya Ventures, BlueField Capital, Asymmetry Ventures, Good New Ventures, and a range of individuals.

The company, founded in 2018 and based in San Francisco and India, has built software for a hotel operating system that handles guests from the moment they book until the end of their stay. The main distinction it has from other software used by hotels and vacation-rental operators who list homes on platforms like Airbnb is that it promotes flexible check-in and check-out times, as well as flexible booking of amenity space like a business center or conference room for remote workers and other guests.

The three founders, CTO Preetam Mohan Shetty, CIO Krishna Sasank Talasila, and CEO Venkatesh Sakamuri, worked together at Oracle in San Francisco. They spent a lot of time traveling together, and continually had to deal with rigid check-in and check-out times, even when dozens of rooms in their hotels were empty.

As they searched for a way to solve this, they realized that the demand is there: Sakamuri even found that 80% of the guests at his family’s vacation rental properties asked for flexible check-in and check-out times.

“The supply side is the problem — the system and the processes of running a hotel,” Sakamuri told Insider. “There has to be a fundamental change. That’s how we decided to create an operating system.”

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