Jess Conroy

Founder and CEO ROH

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Jess Conroy — who also writes and is quoted as Jess Levin Conroy — is the founder and chief executive of ROH, a New York company that sells hotels the financial plumbing between a signed contract and a reconciled payment. The business is fourteen years old and has been two things: she founded it in June 2012 as Carats & Cake, a marketplace connecting couples with wedding venues and suppliers, and relaunched it under the name ROH on 1 February 2023 once it became clear that the durable product was not the marketplace but the payments software underneath it. Her argument is that hospitality innovation has concentrated on the top of the funnel while the unglamorous back half — invoicing, collection, reconciliation — stayed manual, and that payments touch nearly every department in a hotel. ROH is now a preferred or allied vendor to The Leading Hotels of the World, Small Luxury Hotels of the World, Preferred Hotels & Resorts and the IHG Owners Association.

Career Highlights

• Founded the company in June 2012 as Carats & Cake and relaunched it as ROH on 1 February 2023, taking a decade of relationships with hotels and venues into a purpose-built payments and revenue platform.
• Raised a Series A led by 1Sharpe, announced in September 2022, taking total capital raised to just short of $30 million; SilverCircle and Argosy Capital joined and 1Sharpe’s Gregor Watson took a board seat.
• Won a preferred payments platform provider agreement with The Leading Hotels of the World in September 2025, placing ROH in LHW’s Leading Strategic Sourcing programme across more than 400 independent luxury hotels in over 80 countries.
• Added an alliance partnership with Preferred Hotels & Resorts in March 2026 and Silver-level Allied Membership of the IHG Owners Association in September 2026, extending ROH’s AI agent ROHbot to roughly 4,000 member hotels across more than 70 countries.
• Collected TravelTech AI Platform of the Year 2026, HotelTechAwards Best Payment Processing Software 2026, TravelTech Hotel Solution of the Year 2025, a Skift Idea Award 2025, a HotelTechReport Best Tech List placing in 2025 and Paytech Startup of the Year 2025.
• Serves hotel groups including Loews Hotels & Co, Crescent Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International, Auberge Resorts Collection, Noble House Hotels & Resorts and Evolution Hospitality.

Professional Journey

Conroy’s first job out of college was in the training programme at Lord & Taylor, which she left quickly after deciding that big-box retail was not for her. Asking around for advice about the fashion industry got her a meeting in Chris Burch’s office that turned into a job interview; she joined Burch Creative Capital at twenty-three with, by her own account, no relevant experience, and spent three years there as an analyst and then an associate, working alongside entrepreneurs and investors.

She went to NYU’s Stern School of Business deliberately narrowly: she had found herself in the dark during banking meetings and deal structuring at Burch, and wanted enough corporate finance, valuation and accounting to ask the right questions. The idea for her company arrived in a business school lecture about De Beers, which led from diamonds to engagement rings to weddings, and in June 2012 she founded Carats & Cake.

Carats & Cake spent a decade as a marketplace and media property connecting couples with venues and suppliers, and in the process gave her an unusually granular view of how money moves through hospitality — from boutique florists to large hotel groups. The thing that kept surfacing was not marketing but collection: contracts that generated payment schedules nobody automated, invoices chased by hand, cash arriving late. By 2019 the company had reached what she described as a turning point, and it began building software for that problem. The September 2022 Series A, led by 1Sharpe, funded the shift.

On 1 February 2023 she relaunched the business as ROH — a nod to “Run of House”, the industry term for maximising a property’s revenue across all its rooms and spaces. The product moved from invoicing and transactions into ingesting contracts and generating payment schedules automatically, then into a broader financial-operations platform running from intent to reconciliation, with an AI agent, ROHbot, layered on top. Hotels using it, she has said, saw late payments all but disappear, with invoices paid early or on time more than nine times in ten.

Distribution has come through the collections and owner associations rather than hotel by hotel. ROH was named a preferred payments platform provider for The Leading Hotels of the World in September 2025, partnered with Small Luxury Hotels of the World, signed an alliance partnership with Preferred Hotels & Resorts in March 2026, and in September 2026 became a Silver-level Allied Member of the IHG Owners Association, a route to roughly 4,000 hotels. The company has been recognised as TravelTech AI Platform of the Year for 2026 and ranked first on Hotel Tech Report’s top payments processing software list for the same year.

Education

New York University, Stern School of Business

MBA