Sajid Shariff
Co-founder and CEO, Dextr AI
Undergraduate, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay; graduate studies, Stanford University
About
Sajid Shariff is co-founder and chief executive of Dextr AI, which builds AI agents that handle reservations, guest messaging, staff coordination and marketing for hotels. He started the company in July 2025 with Scott Arnold, a former Meta engineer who is its CTO, after returning to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2024 and offering to build a guest-messaging agent for two properties run by contacts from his earlier hospitality work. Shariff studied at IIT Bombay, where he was general secretary, and later at Stanford University. His career spans strategy consulting at the Boston Consulting Group, a director and chief-of-staff role at Sears, and OYO, where he was head of flagship markets during the hotel chain's US expansion. He then joined BYJU'S FutureSchool as head of North America and was promoted in October 2021 to senior vice president of global growth, overseeing growth across nine markets. In September 2026 Dextr AI announced a $6.7 million seed round led by Elevation Capital, with Foundation Capital participating.
Dextr AI's first product, a guest-messaging agent called Alfred, answered questions and helped with check-in and check-out; a voice reservations agent, Daisy, followed. By the time of its September 2026 seed round, the company said its agents handled more than a million interactions a month for hundreds of properties in the US, Canada, the UK and Europe, including franchised hotels under the Hilton, Wyndham, Best Western and IHG flags, and that India was among the markets it planned to enter. Alongside the round it unveiled Doss Gen 1, a layer that lets hotel staff direct the agents by text or voice. Earlier, a YourStory contributor bio described him as having worked on predictive models at Allianz Global Investors in Munich and as a consultant in New York and New Delhi.
Source: edtechchronicle.com
