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Hello and welcome to the Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio. The show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. On today's show, we'll meet the founder of a French hospitality tech company that in just five years has grown to have clients in more than 40 countries.
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We raised the first round of 2.1 million. We launched the product after six months and we were really trying to target that problem of enabling online payments and digital wallets.
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And later we'll hop to Saudi Arabia to hear about a destination development and management project focused on tourism, culture and heritage experiences.
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The transformation that the kingdom is experiencing is something that I don't think will be repeated again in the world, at least not in my lifetime.
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This is the Entrepreneurs with me. Tom Edwards, Foreign. You're listening to the Entrepreneurs. Frederic Robles is the co founder and CEO of Namaste, an all in one booking and payment platform for the hospitality industry with an office based in Paris and a team that spans Europe and Mexico. A former lawyer who worked on major tech disruption stories like Uber in Paris and Amazon Web Services. In the early days of cloud, Frederic saw firsthand how even small teams can upend entire industries. But hospitality was always in his DNA. From summers spent watching his grandparents run their family hotel near his hometown of Montpellier, to working in hotels as a student where on one stint he was to meet his future co founder. When a real operational pain point in hospitality payments resurfaced, everything just seemed to click. In 2021, Frederic left Law to co found Namaste and as CEO has scaled the working with leading luxury hotel brands including La Mamounia, Nobu Hotels and Relay and Chateau. Along the way, Frederic stopped by Midori House in London to discuss the journey so far. I began by asking how at a point when he was already successful in his career, he recognized that nevertheless, something was missing and decided to take the leap.
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Even though I was very successful, making a lot of money and I've sort of, I feel that all the big goals that I had in my career, I sort of know wanting to work for some of the best law firms, having some of the best prestigious clients, making a lot of money, I felt like all of that was kind of, I did it at a very young age and I was like, okay, what's next? Am I going to do the same for the next 10 years? Do I see myself staying in that environment? And I knew there was a voice deep inside of me. It's a difficult one to listen to, but there was a voice that was saying, okay, I Kind of knew already what my life was going to look like for the next 10 or 15 years professionally. And I was like, I think I want something more exciting. I want to make a big decision where I'm like, okay, this is. And it's a tough one. You know, I remember going out of the office, East London, on a cold winter day on the lime bike, and I was like, okay, I'm about to make that thing where I'm gonna quit my job. And I had stock options and all the package and all the. It really felt like, yeah, the leap of faith out of a cliff when you're going to nowhere. And it was super scary. But at the same time, I was like, okay, I want to do it. There was no way back. I knew deep down this moment.
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And you did. And it was that exhilaration because a lot of founders talk about that moment of the sharp intake of breath and you take the step. It really was like that.
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Yeah. And I remember having discussions with my very close friends who said, you know, if were you, I would probably not do it. But at the same time, everybody was. There was always a lot of respect from other people, but for me, it was very. At the end of the day, I wanted to have something fun, to live and to also, you know, I didn't want to see. I was trying to project myself talking about my life in 10, 20 years. And usually there's this quote from Mark Twain that I love that's saying, 20 years from now, you won't regret the things you did. You'll regret the things you haven't done. So go.
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You're making me feel bad now, Frederick.
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You go for the things, go for the things you try. You know, give it a try, crash and burn, whatever. But at least you've tried something. And I was always. For me, there was kind of a safety net. I was like, if this doesn't work, I can always come back one year, two years in to being a lawyer, even though I didn't want to do that. And I wasn't even really thinking about that. But it felt like I have. I had that.
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It was there, that backup. Well, let's talk then. And you began by telling us a little bit about this really interesting sort of confluence of these experiences as a young man and your family connections and hospitality and then this interest within entrepreneurship, I guess, more broadly, and I think really tellingly, this idea of drilling into problems and finding smart fixes. How did you alight on this fix? And this is where we should probably get into a bit of the Namaste 101. What is this thing exactly?
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Yes. So at first I wasn't even sure to understand what the problem was. And usually you should spend a lot more time on the problem than actually jumping to the solution. But my co founder came to me and said, hey, I have hotels and I'm not happy about the way the payment and the booking work when you want to do it directly on the website. So what we call really the direct e commerce distribution, the way it works usually traditionally is still today in 2026 on most of the hotels websites you'll see in the world, you're going to click on book. Now you're ready, you've made your purchase decision and it's one of the industry, you have different touch points. You go into the article in Monocle or anywhere else and you try to find, okay, this is the hotel I want to stay in. And then you go on the website, you want to book and usually you're redirected to a separate page. It's called the booking engine with a different URL. It felt like you're being kicked out of the website and you want to pay or book. You make your booking, you have to enter first name, last name, email address and so on, all your details. And then you have to enter your credit card information. And you cannot pay with anything else than a credit card usually. And you feel as a guest that you're paying but you're not paying because the first thing the hotel is going to ask you when you check in is going to have your credit card sir second time. And if you really feel like you're paying a second time, you're still not paying. They usually do a pre authorization on a payment terminal to hold a certain amount on your credit card and then you stay in the hotel and then when you leave a third time, they ask you to come again at the desk for your checkout and that's when they ask you to this time actually pay and you get your credit card again. That friction and frustration for everyone because it's not nice for the hotel, but it's not great for the guest either was sort of the starting point. And one of the things we wanted to solve for as well is modern payments. And basically the thing we were looking for is how to enable Apple Pay and Google Pay. One click checkout and very simple payment method on a website of a hotel. And you would think it's easy, just I'm sure there are many, many providers actually do it and then you realize actually it doesn't really exist, no one actually does it. And the reason for that is hotels have been especially the tech side of hotels have been built on legacy software. The tradition traditionally were only reservation software. So you would do your reservation, but the payment was always at the hotel. Hospitality is like that. You go to the restaurant, you eat and then at the end you have the check and you pay at the end. So you rarely pay in advance. And people in the mindset still today are why would I pay until I've actually consumed the service? And this is where it's probably one of the only industry where you still have that. When you buy something online, first you pay and then maybe they'll send it to you. But then online for hotels it's very big. Everything inside of the architecture is built so that you cannot pay online easily. It usually comes after. So that's what we've done. We basically bridge the gap between modern payment technology and legacy booking software. So we do enable Apple pay, Google pay natively on the website with no redirection with a very. And that's where I think we resonate a lot with what you guys are doing is it's very design centric. So we try to make the ux, the UI extremely enjoyable for the guests. It's the first contact you have with the hotel, it's on the website, it's your first experience. So let's try to make it as nice as possible. As easy as ordering an Uber with one click checkout with no redirection with Apple Payway it feels super safe, super secure and also level the playing field for the independent hotels versus the bigger platform. What we call online travel agents today that have the majority of bookings today in Europe.
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Let me ask you Frederic, why do you think even some of these brands who themselves are very committed to design first thinking, premium experience, seamlessness in the delivery of the hospitality. Why have they been such laggards in this space? Is it just because they're crushed under the weight of all of that heritage infrastructure? Because you think they would be motivated to be in the vanguard of doing this?
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It's a thing that is also in a way the beauty of hospitality. And again that's, that's my sense. But hospitality traditionally just are a bit allergic to technology because for them it's all about the human connection first. It's trying to make the thing as real and concrete as possible. So there is a sort of systemic really under investment in technology for hotels. One of the consequences of that was also the growth of bigger platform like booking.com, expedia and so on, who invested largely into marketing and so on. And then so they acquired significant market share. But the hotels, the independent hotels today still have a bit of a very old school approach to technology. Usually I think that's part of the problem, but also for us, the opportunity is they see it as something that's going to be painful, complicated and potentially going to bring problems or make them lose the human touch to things.
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And that's the usp. It's like no, no, no. It builds on that, it enhances it and refines it. So tell me, how does the use case come together? Give us some numbers because you've raised pretty impressive amounts of money and you have led the company really pretty quickly through to some pretty impressive performance numbers. What are the mechanics of that? How do you strike up the. That are delivering that growth?
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Yes, so several things here. So we started the company in 2021. We first and I think raising funds at the time was maybe a bit easier than today. We raised the first round of 2.1 million. We launched the product after six months and we were really trying to target that problem of enabling online payments and digital wallets. So there are several things we can improve for the hotel. The first one, my favorite probably is the experience. Hotels who really care about the experience. We have a few examples, obviously experimental is one, I'll give you another hotel, Chateau Voltaire in Paris, which I really, they were all about the experience. It's better for the guest. It's beautiful. You have Apple pay, Google pay, Seamless and so on. And that's really what wanted, making them want the product. Others are more on, I would say performance. They want more direct bookings versus OTAs and other platforms. So they try to drive purely more money through their website. So that's also an angle and we can help with that. We help with mobile conversion and just overall conversion for bookings. That's number two. And then the third one, there is a regulation compliance thing where we can solve for and that means Hospitality Today, 2026. A lot of hotels still today take credit cards on the phone asking for your numbers and they type on the payment terminal. They're not allowed to do this. It still happens in 2026. So these are the sort of say the three main angles where we add value for our customers. And then if you want to talk about how we're performing today, we have about 300 customers in 40 different countries. We generate a bit more than a million in revenues last year. We're growing Fast. We have a few partnerships with incredible what we call hotel affiliations. One of them is Rolais Chateau. Another one is preferred hotels and resorts which we are going to announce in the coming days. So yeah, some quite great seals of approval in the industry.
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Exactly. And people, I'm sure our savvy audience will recognize those stellar names. Where do you find? I'm interested Maybe sector by sector or geography by geography. Frederic, that's interesting. Is there a market or a suite of markets where people are just more eager to get into the conversation? You don't have to kind of knock the doors down. How different is it depending on where you pitch up one day to the next?
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Quite interesting. I think we've discovered that on the ground. So obviously we're based in France. We have very much a French DNA. Our first customers, our first investors, our first employees were based in France. So this is where everything started. We now have about two thirds of our customers in France or in Europe or French group having a presence in Europe. We are in more than 40 countries. And that's the beauty of this product. It can basically work anywhere in the world if you're compatible with us. And we have some in Indonesia, we have in very remote, exotic places, some in Morocco and so on. But I would say the main markets are Europe and us. Actually recently we signed some of the most amazing brands in the us. We're working with the Greenwich Hotel in New York, part of Roberto De Niro, some others.
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I think I've heard of that guy.
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And then also proper hospitality on the west side. The west coast, sorry, which is also an iconic brand up and coming which we're very proud to work with. And I think to answer your question, on sort of culture, we've done the crafting in the French way, very much on quality, on beauty. But then we also, you need to have the open minded and being very open minded and ambitious like you are in the us. So if you have both, I think you have a good way. And I think Americans are more receptive to innovation. For sure they'll give you a try. They'll be like, okay, this is a great product, I want to give it a try and if it doesn't work, that's fine. In Europe, the decision making, they're a lot more cautious, they want to see numbers, they will take more time to make a decision. I think it reflects a lot the culture, the culture of each.
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Well, just to take a slight detour. And it's interesting because actually Tyler was musing about Europe's need to Quicken the pace, become a bit more dynamic. But actually, this feels like a business that is quintessentially French or European. And whilst its impact, I think, is clearly going to be global, it could only have come from France, No?
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Well, I think.
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Well, actually, I think that's a compliment, Frederic.
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I think it's a compliment. I'll take it. And I think one of our first partnership was actually Rolais Chateau. The French hospitality excellence. Culture is something we try to be inspired from, also in the way we craft and do the product, but also the service, the customer service and the human experience behind our product. We're not just a tech company selling a tech product and then disappearing for the hotel. We really try to build a relationship, build a partnership drive the results that they're interested in. I feel very international in the way I approach it. It could have come from anywhere. But I think the fact that we had this problem, this sort of attention to detail, to this specific thing. Yes, there is a lot of French DNA behind what we are doing, for sure.
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Let's throw things forward. So, as you say, it's amazing journey, incredible pace, really, just since 2021. What's the plan? Give us an idea. What do we. Only a couple of weeks into 2026. It feels mean to ask you, so close to the start.
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No, and I think it's a great question. As a startup, you always sort of, you know, for a long time, you just try to survive to the next day. But I think for us, the plan is to get as soon as we can to profitability. I think it's a big milestone for a lot of startups around, especially in the current world where fundraising can be difficult and then it's to grow, but not to grow in a super aggressive way. Like you see a lot of startups trying to just take over the world overnight. We know this is an industry where you need to build trust. Relationships take time. Also, again, I feel very fortunate and that's probably the thing I'm the most proud of as an entrepreneur today is the team we've built. We're not that many. We're about 20 people in the entire team, any sort of department. Today, we're very lucky to have people who are young, extremely ambitious, extremely responsive, and they have a sense of urgency and immediacy. They really care and they know how important it is. Especially in hospitality, when someone is asking for help, we like to go the extra mile, doing the connectivity that nobody wants to do, responding. Over the weekend, we try to really like a hotel, you know they're here 24, seven for you. We try to do the same.
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There's no keys. They never lock it up.
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Exactly, exactly. And they never turn off the oven. It's like kind of. But it's very. I think it's in our DNA and especially on the leadership side on every single front in the company. And finding these people is really hard. Some people are still wanting to work very hard and actually find pleasure in doing this. And I think that's the key. There needs to be a harmony into what you do and how much you like it and your personal life and so on. And for me at the moment, it really feels like that. And I think the people who are working with us are very much on the same page. You can see in their eyes whether they have that little light where they're really passionate about it. And I think here there is a passion and sometimes it's different. So some of us really like hospitality. Some others just really like the idea of building things and solving payment problems. But there is this common ground of core values that we have. The first we have three ones at Namaste, which I think are important. The first one is a five star mindset mentality. We try to get inspired from the customer we serve and it's real excellence. We really try to thrive into operational excellence. 90% of what you do in your job, nobody sees it. So it's really for you that you try to make that perfect and always improve. That's a very important mindset. The second one is something maybe I took over from Amazon a bit, is that customer and experience obsession. And customer obsession is a big thing at Amazon, but for us it's more the. Into the experience. We care more about experience than material things. Maybe, but it's making that and it's really a very wide definition. It's whether it's for your colleagues, for our investors, for the actual customer, for the guests. It's also the interesting thing about us is we're B2B 2C. We are in touch with the final customer, which is a great thing, but obsessing about making that experience great. And then the last one, probably the most important one for an entrepreneur, but also for a startup starting to do anything, is the fighting spirit, which we call humble fighting spirit. All the people we have are really on the same page. And if you don't feel comfortable with these three, usually you're not part of the team.
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That was Frederic Robles, co founder and CEO of Namaste. And you can find out more about the Business by heading to Namaste IO. You're listening to the entrepreneurs. Kiran Jai Haslam is the Chief Marketing officer of Dariya Gate Development Authority, a multi billion dollar project transforming a large district in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Just moments ago, from downtown Riyadh, with more than 14 square kilometers of purpose built urban space designed to promote walkable streets, to connect residents with nature and to deliver a quality of life unlike anything else in the city, Daria, the original home of the House of Saud, is now setting a new standard for modern living. Our Tom Webb caught up with Kieran at the recent World Travel Market in London. And Tom began by asking him to explain the region. Here's Kiran.
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Darreya goes all the way back in time and is recognized at around about the year 400, when a tribe came from the western provinces and settled in what they found to be in the middle of an arid desert environment, a natural oasis, a fresh running river named Awadi. And it was named after that tribe, the Banu Hanifa tribe. And so the wadi was named Wadi Hanifa. That wadi cuts around it, serpentines around a plateau and the area of that plateau and adjacent to either side of the banks of this river, which were really, really fertile soil, they provided the opportunity for agricultural development. And so this tribe sets up the first agricultural settled society across the Arabian Peninsula between the years 414 46. 1446, they're very, very prosperous. And this is a very important origin story for us because the Banu Hanifa tribe, they basically brought this agricultural societal construct to life. And then by 1727, this location was the formation of the first Saudi state. So the origin of the first Saudi state is linked to agriculture. Now, a lot of people around the world, when they think Saudi Arabia, they think Bedouin existence through the desert, camels, sand, oil. This is a very important location because it's the birthplace story of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It's the incredible legacy and lineage of the ruling royal family, the Al Saud royal family. And so this location becomes very celebrated because as a central location for agriculture, it became very wealthy, very prosperous, had its own systems of justice, systems of education. In 1766, you had the first mint creating currency for the peninsula from Duraya. From the location which is today our UNESCO World Heritage site of Atoreyf. And just adjacent to that, you had a school for male and female studying celestial movement and astronomy so that they could harvest their crops from this location. First Saudi states it's the ability for all Saudis to connect with their true identity to say, I'm Saudi Arabian. And Daraya is this wonderful geographical expression of what it means to be Saudi with this origin story. So today what we've done is we've taken this location, this birthplace, we've created incredible curated historical experience and a UNESCO World Heritage Site that sits at the center of this development. And around this location, we have created a master plan to deliver a city for the future. What we call the City of earth. And it's 14 and a half square kilometers and it's literally a city from a blank canvas. It's a 64 billion US dollar giga project. It's 10 minutes away from the central point of downtown Riyadh, 21 minutes away from an international airport, which is King Khalid International Airport when you fly into Riyadh. And this location is going to deliver a quality of life proposition which hasn't been delivered yet in any city. Master planning that has been purpose built and designed to unlock a pedestrian way of life and a quality of life proposition which connects you with biodiversity, with a natural environment, with public realm, and creates meaningful exchange for communities to coexist. Because it's pedestrian and it's a very, very interesting way in which we've brought this construct to life because of the forms of art, architecture, and the building code that we've deployed. The form of architecture is nudge the architecture true to that location. And you see it in the UNESCO World Heritage Site and as well the adobe mud brick construction. So this makes this location feel incredibly unique and special. It makes it feel absolutely like we are locked into the people of 300 years ago in that exact location. But we're delivering a city environment with a quality of life proposition we'd like to see exist for hundreds of years, far into the future. So a huge investment into the region where people have lived for hundreds, thousands of years. How do we ensure that the money, the investment, is also going back to the local community? It's a really important element of who we are. And so there's lots of ways in which we bring this to life. Firstly, the way in which the city is constructed is entirely around that origin story. And therefore the language, the people, the poetry, the art, the architecture, obviously that's physically deployed in the city. So the embodiment of everything that the Najti Duraya origins were, we're celebrating again in physical form. In addition to that, we are basically taking our footprint within the Diraya governance area, which is home to 96,000 inhabitants. Today. We're bringing a further 130,000 inhabitants to the location. And in order to do this, we are empowering the local community. We do that through many different ways. An example of one is within our company, which is delivering the project. We have over 14% of our organization that is a Dirrea local inhabitant. And so what we'll do is we'll find people in Dirrea and we'll say, how can we invest in you? How can you be part of what we're doing? If you wanted to be a tour guide and you wanted to speak Arabic, but also speak Japanese, we'll train you and we'll make sure that you have a very healthy career in Daraya, maybe in the travel and tourism sector. We do that with hotels. We started a tourism school so that we could bring our community from Darreya into the world of hotels, into the world of retail. So there's many, many ways in which we focus on that. And the. It's a really important metric that we use as an organization to measure just how we are basically in tune with our community now. 2025 has been a huge year for you already. You've reached enormous milestones, big cultural moments. Can you walk us through some of your personal highlights? Yes. At the beginning of this year, we opened our first hotel, Andrea. And that's a bit of a game changer because from a destination perspective, until this year, you had to stay in a hotel, which you'd probably type in Ritz Carlton, Riyadh. So it's really nice that now you're typing in the word Daraya into the search for a hotel. The first hotel is a luxury collection project and it's incredibly special to us because it's not an off the shelf hotel experience. It's something that we worked with Marriott very closely on and we defined what a heritage experience could be in Dreya. Even in terms of how the building of the hotel or the many buildings that constitute the hotel were crafted and brought to life. And it might be in the physicality of the buildings, but also in terms of the workforce that's there, but also in terms of the culinary offering and some of the cultural offerings. It's a pedestrian friendly hotel, so you can walk within one and a half minutes to one of the fine dining districts or to the UNESCO World heritage site. Within 30 seconds, you can walk across the road to the Dirair Art Futures Museum. So it's a really, really nice location and it celebrates overlooking the historic Wadi that I'd mentioned before becoming the birthplace of the kingdom. But also this hotel experience in terms of culinary offerings, we worked with Michael Mina to bring a very interesting signature restaurant to life where he has selected ingredients from all across Saudi Arabia. And he's created a very unique offering which is called Talid. It's the first in the world for Michael Mina to do this and so we hope to see many more taled's popping up all around the world now with the success that we've seen off the culinary offering which is unique to Darreya in that new hotel. Now finally we taking ourselves back to London where we are. You're halfway through your fantastic presence here at the world travel market. What is your big message? Why are you here? The time is now to visit the kingdom with the opportunities particularly around the winter period in Riyadh. Winter in Riyadh is absolutely glorious. The sky is clear and cool and crisp. You need to bring a jacket. So please don't arrive in Dreuo without a jacket at this time of year because you'll need to stay a little bit warm because it can get quite cool in the evening, beautiful clear skies and days in the daytime. And so we're here to say come and see us now. We've got lots on offer. We've got Drea season that's just about to kick off which is cultural festival which runs for a period of four months. We've got, as I said before, an opportunity for you to stay in the hotel in the first Daraya offering hotel, a luxury collection Babsamhan heritage hotel experience. And there's lots that's coming up just on the horizon. We have a couple of master plans adjacent to the Diraya master plan that I mentioned. In one of those, it's called Wadi Safa. We have a 27 hole Greg Norman golf course. We're about to kick off the first international tournaments taking place on that golf course. This golf course sits in the middle of this incredible rugged landscape which is truly breathtaking to experience and an incredible course to play on. And so we're very, very excited working with Gulf Saudi on this project and that now starts to come to life as well. So it feels like now is the time. Downstairs from where we're seated right now on the stand, we've got presents from Oberoi, from Capella, from the Ritz Carlton because these are the next three hotels that will open within the next 12 to 18 months in Dirrea. Out of the 37 hotels that we have coming in, the master plan, the Drea project, the historical component, it's a very compelling component of the entire city. That will be completed by the tail end of 2027 and the beginning of 2028. And then the rest of the project is set for completion for 2030. I think to come and visit us now would be really great because the transformation that the kingdom is experiencing is something that I don't think will be repeated again in the world, at least not in my lifetime. And so I welcome visitors to come and see it. And I guess the most important reason that I think you should come and see us now is for anyone who hasn't been to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, you won't understand it until you're there. It will absolutely surprise you. And the most intoxicating feeling that you get from being in the Kingdom is this, this incredible optimism that the population of Saudis have that today is a beautiful day and tomorrow's going to be an even brighter day. And there are very few places on the planet that you can visit easily where you find that kind of unified, aligned optimism from a local population feeling that things are moving in the right direction.
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That was Kiran J. Haslam, the CMO of the Daria Gate Development Authority. And you can find out more by heading to dgda. And that is all for this episode of the program. We'll be back at the same time next week. The Entrepreneurs is produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewis. You can listen again and find out more about the show@monocle.com that's where you can subscribe to the magazine and read more about better businesses every month. You can also follow us and catch up with the archive wherever you get your audio. If you'd like to get in touch with the team, email Laura on lrkonical.com I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to the Entrepreneurs.