Nadine ElAshkar built a hospitality tech startup from a USD 60k student debt pile and sold it to Inn-Flow — here’s what she learned

🛎️ Nadine ElAshkar didn’t have a playbook. No family network in Silicon Valley, no community of Egyptian founders who’d done it before her, no roadmap for what came next. What she had was a problem she understood — her immigrant father driving between Restaurant Depot and Sam’s Club to find the cheapest supplies for his hospitality business — and knowing that no one was building the right solution for it, so she had to.

ElAshkar built Lilo, an AI-powered procure-to-pay platform for the hospitality industry, out of Stanford with USD 60k in student debt and just under USD 3k in her savings. One thing led to another, and Lilo found itself growing at roughly 10% y-o-y before being acquired by Inn-Flow, a US-based hotel back-office software provider, in May 2026. The agreement unified procurement with Inn-Flow’s existing capabilities, with ElAshkar staying on board as head of innovation.

EnterpriseAM sat down with ElAshkar (LinkedIn) to find out how Lilo came to be, what the fundraising and exit process actually looked like from the inside, and what Egyptian entrepreneurs — whether building at home or abroad — need to know. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

EnterpriseAM: Take us back to the beginning — Cairo, AUC, McKinsey. What were you chasing?

Nadine ElAshkar (NEA): I studied in Cairo all through school and undergrad at AUC. One of my friends recommended that I work in consulting — I didn’t even know what consulting was at the time — and so I did at a local consulting firm one summer. That year, McKinsey came to hire from AUC; I applied, and I joined their Dubai office. I was the only person they hired directly from undergrad that year. I really loved working in consulting in Dubai — you get to work on really big projects and solve really interesting problems. After Dubai, I moved to New York with McKinsey for a year.

And then I knew I wanted to start something. I’d always known I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I applied to Harvard and Stanford and ended up going to Stanford for my MBA. I went there knowing I wanted to start a company — COVID happened mid-MBA, but I kept going.

E: What did McKinsey teach you that you couldn’t have learned anywhere else?

NEA: Challenging my own perspectives. I remember when I first joined — everyone around me was MIT, Harvard, this and that, and I was like, “Oh my god, I just went to AUC.” I thought, “Give it six months and I’m fired.” But I was among the top performers.

Then I went to New York and thought the same thing — I got there and realized it’s no different from Dubai. If anything, people in the Dubai office are more hungry and more innovative. We grow up having to think outside the box. That was the lesson that compounded throughout — every time I told myself the next place would be out of my reach, it wasn’t.

E: Tell us about Lilo. Procurement software for hotels is a specific niche — what made you see it as the right problem to solve?

NEA: My parents moved to the US on the green card lottery. My dad would drive to different stores to shop for the cheapest products for his hospitality business. It made no sense that he was spending his time like that. So I started by building him an Excel sheet to manage vendors and products. That’s how Lilo started.

Then I started looking at who else had this problem. The software options in hospitality were not great. So I decided to build it properly. In technical terms, it’s procure-to-pay software. We help hotels and restaurants manage their supplier base — all vendors in one place, ordering in one place, approvals in one place, payments in one place. And then we layered on inventory management and other capabilities from there.

E: What were the early days actually like — building the team, landing the first client, figuring out what you were getting wrong?

NEA: I literally was the software. The Excel sheet was the product, and anything the software was supposed to do, I was doing in the background — weekends, nights, it didn’t matter. Then I brought on an engineer, and then my co-founder, Javier Araya, joined. He’d just sold his own company and was a friend from Stanford. I wanted to build internationally from the start, not because it was cheaper, but because I believed in it. We had people in Chile — where Javier is from — Montenegro, Turkey, Colombia, Brazil. The sales team was in the US, the product team was in the US. You get the best person for the job, wherever they are.

Getting the first client was madness. I’d go from 8am to 8pm, messaging people on LinkedIn or riding my scooter around New York knocking on hotel doors. One person said they were interested, I flew to Pittsburgh, and that became our first external client.

E: How did you fund it? Walk us through the fundraising journey.

NEA: I graduated with USD 60k in student debt and under USD 3k left in my account. I started fundraising from the Stanford network. I didn’t even understand angel investing at first — I thought you had to pay them back if the company didn’t work out. I called one of our professors for advice on a negotiation, and he said, “Tell him Weaver is already investing.” I said, “But then I’d be lying.” He replied: “No, you wouldn't — I’m telling you I’m going to invest.” That helped us breathe and get started, and then we raised an angel round, and then more after that.

The biggest thing I learned about fundraising: A lot of it is psychology. You have to believe in it for someone else to want to come in, because they’re taking a risk on you.

E: You were building in the US, but you’re Egyptian. Did that matter — and in which direction?

NEA: Both. Not having the network in the US is a real handicap. There isn’t a strong Egyptian entrepreneurship community in Silicon Valley, and that’s something I genuinely want to change. But in other ways, it was a huge enabler. Growing up in Egypt, you learn to improvise. You think around problems that don’t have clean solutions. That instinct manifests when you’re building something. People who grew up with more infrastructure build within the rules of what’s possible. We just ask, “What if we do it this way instead?”

E: There’s a moment in every founder’s journey where the question shifts from “how do I grow this?” to “should I sell?” When did that happen for you?

NEA: We were growing around 10% y-o-y  in revenue. Our plan was to keep going. We were prepping documents for our next round of funding. We had a commercial partner we were close to, and we said, “We’re about to raise — do you want to put a strategic check in?” They sent back a letter for the full acquisition. I was shocked. We called them, and they said, “We’d actually love to buy the company.” My co-founder and I thought about it and realized: we were going to build what they’d built anyway, eventually. It just made sense — personally, professionally, strategically.

E: How do you know when you’ve found the right buyer?

NEA: My co-founder and I actually had this conversation a lot. We’d name companies and ask each other, “How much would they have to offer for you to sell?” For many, the answer was “never.” Because the relationship doesn’t end when you sell. You keep working with them, you keep building alongside them. The partner matters enormously.

E: What do founders get wrong about exits?

NEA: That they’re ceremonial. People imagine you put your company up for sale, buyers come knocking, and there’s a big moment. That is not how it happens. It happens in the small things — in a conversation, in being open when someone asks a question you weren’t expecting. The best advice I can give anyone: make more friends, be more open, don’t shut down inbound interest reflexively just because you’re not “in sell mode.”

E: You’re now head of innovation at Inn-Flow. What does that actually look like?

NEA: I get to do the parts of the job I loved most — thinking about what comes next, what products we add, how we make what we have better. It’s a bit like being a scientist trying to figure out what to invent, except less glamorous. I touch product, sales, marketing, customer success — I work across the whole company. And I get paid to learn. I’m constantly looking at trends and thinking about how we capitalize on them.

E: What’s the hardest part of going from founder to employee — even at a company that wanted you enough to acquire you?

NEA: You go from “I call the shots” to being plugged into a bigger system where you have to pause and ask, “How are things done here?” As the founder, the culture is you — you don’t have to think about it. Definitely an adjustment.

E: Best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

NEA: My co-founder used to bluntly say, “Have big balls.” Don't be the thing that stops you. The world will already add enough friction. Don’t add more. Ask for what you want. Go try things. Don’t self-select out before you even start. And something we talked about a lot: the power of compounding. It’s theoretical until it isn’t. This applies to habits, to relationships, to the team you build. The first hire compounds. The first conversation compounds. Do the small thing consistently, because things compound whether you're paying attention or not.