A father-and-son team with a combined 60 years in hospitality has launched Astound Ventures, a collaborative investment fund targeting $30 million to back companies that improve what the founders call net unit margin — "NUM" — for hotel real estate owners, operators, and brands.
Burt Cabañas, founder and chairman of Benchmark Resorts & Hotels and co-chairman of Pyramid Global Hospitality, and his son Alex Cabañas, Pyramid's executive chairman, are leading the fund alongside CFO Kirk Jones, a veteran of Benchmark and Capella Hotels. The trio has already raised more than $8 million and made initial investments in 10 companies, with a stated goal of backing up to 20 over a three-year investment window.
The Investment Thesis
Unlike traditional venture funds backed by institutional allocators, Astound is structured as a "collaborative fund," raising exclusively from hotel owners, operators, and brands. The model is deliberate: industry insiders who understand unit-level economics provide capital, credibility, and commercial relationships simultaneously. "Our entire fund will be smart money — industry investors, not institutional allocations," Alex Cabañas said. "We are searching for work horses, not unicorns."
The fund's early portfolio reflects a deliberately broad definition of hospitality innovation. Initial investments span sustainable tissue solutions, heated outdoor furniture, mobile point-of-sale technology, wireless energy management, autonomous travel technology, and meetings-related platforms. The range signals that Astound is not a pure software play. "Technology is not the only focus of Astound; the focus is any product, service or technology that improves NUM," Cabañas said.
Operator Access as a Differentiator
Astound's pitch to portfolio companies centers on accelerated market access rather than capital alone. Ludovic Siouffi, co-founder and CEO of Fox Fold Products, a sustainable tissue company in the portfolio, credited Astound with compressing years of cold outreach into direct introductions to hotel CEOs and ownership groups. Kevin Long, founder and CEO of outdoor-living company Outmore Living, said the fund's network translated into "qualified leads, strategic relationships and faster deal velocity."
That distribution leverage is built on Astound Collaborators, a parallel global network of real estate and hospitality leaders the Cabañases assembled through more than 300 industry conversations before the fund launched. The network now informs product development and provides market feedback for portfolio companies — effectively de-risking pilots before they reach scale. "Too many pilots without owners at the ground level never scale," Alex Cabañas said. "Our approach will have fewer wasted pilots."
For operators tracking the broader wave of hospitality technology investment reshaping hotel operations, Astound represents a meaningful structural shift: veterans with real operating P&L pressure choosing to fund their own solutions rather than wait for outside capital to address industry-specific problems. The fund's framing around artificial intelligence — Cabañas cited a "tectonic shift in revenue, operations and distribution" — also positions it to evaluate AI-enabled workflow tools as that category matures, a trend Food & Beverage Magazine and sister outlets have tracked across the broader hospitality and foodservice operator landscape.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
