Our Story

In 2016, Nikolai Balba and Luis Segredo saw an opportunity to change the hospitality tech landscape. They believed the challenges surrounding integrations were inhibiting innovation.

Integrations were built point to point, meaning every time two systems needed to communicate, a separate integration was built and deployed. Rolling out new integrated solutions was slow and expensive for both tech providers and hotels. Not only does this increase reliance on a handful of vendors, it also means portfolio growth is hampered with excessive time and IT costs. Balba and Segredo were soon joined by industry experts Laurent Idrac and Brad More, who shared the vision. Today, the team is made up of more than 60 employees from all parts of the world with hundreds of years of combined hospitality experience.

Who We Are

Hapi Leadership

CEO, CO-Founder

Luis Segredo

Luis is a serial entrepreneur who, before Hapi, served as EVP of Strategic Initiatives for Amadeus Hospitality. Prior to that, he was President of the MTech Division at Newmarket International, Inc. Segredo has been in the hotel industry since 1993, starting with the introduction of some of the first Windows apps to hotels, and has experienced the challenges of technology migrations over the years through the transition from licensed seat model to managed hosting model. He served in various roles within Amadeus, supporting the integration of acquisitions. Segredo has over 25 years experience offering technology at the property and corporate levels. He earned a BBA in International Finance & Marketing from the University of Miami.

Chief Technology Officer

Brad More

Brad is a seasoned industry leader with an in-depth knowledge of hospitality technology and innovation developed over more than two decades. An industry pioneer, he created one of the first full two-way reservation interfaces between a hotel CRS and PMS. More has had myriad successes throughout his career, including founding and serving as CEO of Theodatus LLC, which he later successfully exited in a sale to Vegas.com. In addition to his success in the hotel technology vendor sector, More has also served on the hotelier side, where he was the Director of Application Development for Hyatt Hotels Corporation. Based in Naples, Florida, More currently holds AWS Certifications as a Solutions Architect and DevOps Engineer.

CO-FOUNDER

Nikolai Balba

Nikolai brings more than 20 years experience in designing, building and implementing technology solutions in the travel and hospitality verticals. He served as the CTO for Force.com and VP of Guest Centric Solutions at Amadeus Hospitality, and later as the CEO of Aquiva Labs, a recognized Salesforce and data integration development company with offices in North and South America and Europe. Balba’s experience with complex enterprise implementations of application and data integration solutions for hospitality has led him to believe in a vision of distributed, real time and unified data streaming platform that can open the industry for innovation.

Chief Operating Officer

Laurent Idrac

Laurent has more than 30 years of experience in hospitality. Until 2018, he was Group CIO for Accor, based in France, and managed a partnership with the Innovation Factory, the first innovation campus cluster in Paris. In 2014, Idrac was elected to the Board of Governors of Hospitality Technology Next Generation (HTNG). He was a member of the Customer Advisory Boards of Oracle and Amadeus Hospitality. In 2017, he received the Innovation Award from CHTA (China Hospitality Technology Alliance). From 2002 to 2012, Idrac ran IT Departments for Accor North America.