Raj Chudasama grew up around hospitality — the family's roots in the hotel business stretch back to 1981, when they acquired their first motel in Oklahoma. But Raj's own path into the industry came through a different door first. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Oklahoma and went on to complete an MBA in Finance from California State University, Long Beach, before beginning his career in technology, managing IT projects for Fortune 500 clients at Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC).
That cross-industry lens — understanding how systems, data, and people interact — became a defining edge when he returned to his roots. In 2004, Raj helped formalize the family's growing portfolio into Kriya Hotels, a management company built for the next chapter of growth.
The early years were defined by acquisition. Kriya identified underperforming hotels across DFW — Comfort Suites Las Colinas, Comfort Inn Plano, Best Western Addison, and others — renovated them, and repositioned them to outperform their competitive sets. In 2007, the company made its largest purchase to that point: a 100-room Wingate by Wyndham in Las Colinas. Then in 2008, Kriya made a decisive pivot — from acquiring existing hotels to building its own.
That shift changed everything. In 2013, Kriya developed its first Hilton-branded property, Hampton Inn & Suites Trophy Club, which opened to a sold-out weekend. It marked the beginning of a deliberate portfolio transformation: exiting mixed-brand assets and rebuilding around Hilton and Marriott flags only. Three Home2 Suites by Hilton properties followed between 2015 and 2017. A La Quinta developed in 2017 was later rebranded as Four Points by Sheraton Plano. Today the portfolio is entirely Hilton and Marriott — six properties built with intention.
Running hotels at that scale meant confronting the same technology friction constantly. In 2013, Raj launched Kriya RevGEN — a brand-agnostic revenue management platform built because nothing on the market worked for multi-brand operators. By 2022, it had grown into a platform significant enough to attract OTA Insight (now Lighthouse), who acquired it.
Raj's entrepreneurial reach has never been limited to hotels alone. In 2012, he founded Neptune Ventures, a residential real estate investment company in DFW. In 2020, he opened Venture X Grapevine, a boutique coworking space at 2451 W Grapevine Mills Circle near DFW Airport — bringing the same hospitality sensibility to a premium workspace environment.
After the Lighthouse acquisition, Raj took a deliberate pause — relocating the family to Madrid, Spain for a year. Distance from daily operations brought clarity. The hotel sales technology landscape, examined from the outside, was clearly broken. He came home with a plan.
Today, Raj runs Kriya Hotels while co-founding M1 Intel, the company behind Matrix — a hotel sales intelligence layer built for multi-property operators. It centralizes group leads, tracks pipelines across a portfolio, and delivers real-time reporting without the overhead of legacy CRM platforms.