4 Friends Quit Their Corporate Jobs To Build A Seamless AI Hotel Booking API – Achieve 500% Revenue Growth In Just 4 Years

Did you know that a great deal goes into booking a hotel for your vacation?

While it may seem like just a few clicks on a travel portal or website, the reality is that the hotel options you scan through take months to get there in the first place.

Travel agencies often have to connect with numerous hotel suppliers and try to align with their own systems and rules – all to show you a host of prices and rooms.

“We make this process a hundred times simpler and more seamless for online travel agents and agencies. Instead of building connections with hundreds of APIs, agencies can now connect to just our Universal Hotel API and gain access to hundreds of hotel suppliers,” Abhinav Sinha, co-founder of ZentrumHub, tells Startup Pedia in an exclusive interview.

Founded in 2021 and based in Pune, ZentrumHub is an artificial intelligence-powered hotel booking API that acts as an end-to-end booking solution for online travel agencies.

Today, it is trusted by more than 90 global travel businesses such as Akbar Travels, TravClan, DowntownTravel, and Fora Travel.

Also read: Meet these two 22-YO engineers who built India’s first AI-powered Robot that burns weeds with lasers instead of pesticides (startuppedia.in)

THE BACKGROUND

ZentrumHub was built from the ground up by four co-founders – Abhinav Sinha (CEO), Bhushan Tamhankar (COO), Boney Mittal (CRO), and Kumar Waghmode (CTO).

During 2020 and 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic shook up the world, the travel industry was among the hardest hit.

The journey began with Abhinav Sinha, a travel technology expert with over a decade of experience building connectivity solutions for OTAs and travel platforms.

For years, Abhinav had witnessed how travel companies struggle to link seamlessly with hotel suppliers and aggregators. The challenge was universal: complex integrations, unstable systems, endless costs, and painful delays.

“The thing is - everyone in the travel tech industry wanted to move fast. But supplier connectivity kept slowing everything down. The very technology meant to simplify the process had become the bottleneck,”Abhinav tells Startup Pedia.

During the pandemic, when the industry came to a standstill, Abhinav finally had the time to reflect — and the determination to act. The need for a scalable, reliable, and faster connectivity solution was clear, and this time, he wanted to build it from scratch, the right way.

Abhinav reached out to two close friends – Boney Mittal, a B2B business strategist and marketing leader, and Bhushan Tamhankar, an operations veteran with nearly two decades at Akbar Travels and WNS Global. Eventually, Kumar Waghmode, who had been working in DevOps and analytics for close to fifteen years now, also joined the co-founder team.

“All of us have been working either in the travel industry or in the B2B corporate world for years now,”Bhushan Tamhankar says.

Abhinav Sinha, Bhushan Tamhankar, Boney Mittal, and Kumar Waghmode decided to quit their jobs and offer a single, universal connection for online travel agents, addressing the growing need for a seamless, one-stop connection for OTAs to access hotel APIs with speed, ease, and efficiency.

On April 14, 2021, ZentrumHub was officially established in Pune, Maharashtra.

Also read: Gurugram Engineer Starts A Cybersecurity Co. From Home; His Startup Now Serves 800+ Clients Globally & Generated ₹25 Cr+ Rev During Last FY (startuppedia.in)

JOURNEY AND CHALLENGES

The startup founders pooled their savings and launched ZentrumHub with a small team of backend engineers who would build the platform.

“Then, it was just months of constantly making iterations, rigorously testing them, and finally releasing our AI-powered hotel booking API in the market,” entrepreneur Abhinav Sinha says.

The next challenge was building trust with major players in the industry – the ZentrumHub team had to convince companies and travel agencies to try their tech offerings and combine them with their existing systems.

“Interoperability was always something we played on. Then, with time, we started adding features like data analytics to stay ahead of other tools present in the market. Eventually, we made ZentrumHub into something that is a one-stop solution for hotel APIs,” Boney Mittal says.

By 2022, ZentrumHub became a leading choice for numerous global and national travel businesses.

ZENTRUMHUB: ONE INSTANT CONNECTION → NUMEROUS HOTEL SUPPLIERS

To put it simply, think of ZentrumHub as a universal remote control for hotel bookings.

Instead of travel agencies having to manually and painstakingly connect with numerous different hotel suppliers one by one, ZentrumHub offers one unified connection that gives access to 100+ hotel suppliers instantly.

The tech startup has two primary products at the moment – the ZentrumHub Connect and the Zentrum Booking Engine:

Zentrum Connect

It is a connectivity platform that enables buyers and sellers to access and distribute hotel inventories. When buyers connect with Zentrum Connect APIs, they automatically gain access to a wide range of hotel suppliers, such as bedbanks, GDSs, and channel managers.

“This is all done with just one unified API connection. Speed and efficiency go up, and costs come down,” startup founder Boney Mittal says.

Zentrum Booking Engine

The founders describe it as an AI-enabled B2B and B2C booking engine that end-to-end replicates an online travel agency hotel booking experience. It is loaded with modules like revenue management, currency conversion, white label, agent boarding, and hotel-room mapping integration.

As a unified platform that accesses hotel APIs seamlessly, ZentrumHub distinguishes itself from other solutions in the market by maintaining a 99.9% uptime. It also has AI-powered features, including ChatGPT integration that enables dynamic searches and offers access to more than ten million properties worldwide.

“We also maintain less than one second overhead as far as suppliers’ response time is concerned,” entrepreneur Abhinav Sinha says.

Apart from this, the tech platform provides a robust AI-powered search, pricing algorithms, pre-integrated 100+ hotel suppliers, and white-label customization options.

“Think of ZentrumHub as a complete ecosystem for all things B2B hotel bookings, revenue management, and analytics. This is what makes the platform far more efficient than competitors,” startup founder Kumar Waghmode remarks.

Also read: This mechanical engineer quit high-paying job to rescue bees - Now clocks Rs. 65 Lakh annual turnover (startuppedia.in)

GROWTH AND IMPACT

Over the years, ZentrumHub has committed to remaining an entirely bootstrapped company.

“Since the beginning, reinvesting our revenue into the business to enhance and expand our offerings has been of paramount importance,”Abhinav Sinha mentions.

Within four years, the business has witnessed a revenue growth of over 500%.

Currently, ZentrumHub serves more than 90 global travel businesses in over ten countries. The artificial intelligence-powered hotel booking API platform’s clientele includes travel businesses such as Akbar Travels, TravClan, DowntownTravel, Fora Travel, and Musafir.com.

With more than 100 premium hotel suppliers connected to ZentrumHub, like Expedia, RateHawk, HotelBeds, Priceline, WebBeds, and TBO, online travel agents get seamlessly connected to them in one click.

While ZentrumHub started with just Abhinav Sinha, Bhushan Tamhankar, Boney Mittal, and Kumar Waghmode in its team, today the team has expanded to more than 30 professionals who contribute to various functions of technology, sales, marketing, customer success, and operations.

“Since 2021, we have achieved remarkable revenue growth of 6X,” Boney Mittal mentions.

ZentrumHub’s journey and impact have been validated and recognized by various awards, such as “Booking Platform of the Year 2025” by TravelTech Breakthrough.

“We have won this two years in a row now,” Kumar smiles.

The travel tech platform has also been recognized as one of the startups in the list of “Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2025.”

WHAT’S NEXT

In the next three years, ZentrumHub aims to position itself as a global, all-in-one travel tech solution that offers a turnkey booking platform for online travel agents and agencies.

“We are constantly delivering deeper customer and data insights on ZentrumHub and enhancing our AI capabilities. Growing our hotel supplier network and strengthening our market position in the United States, the Middle East, and Asian markets is also on the list. We are going to become the face of tech travel platforms in the world, and our team is already working towards this goal day in and day out,”Abhinav Sinha signs off.

Also read: “Typing ‘I love you’ never feels the same as saying it" - Meet Hyderabad founder who launches a voice-first app for real human connections (startuppedia.in)