Roman Pedan

Founder & CEO Kasa

Last Reviewed: September 25, 2026

Executive Summary

Roman Pedan is the founder and chief executive of Kasa, which operates apartment-style hotels and boutique hotels for property owners across the United States. It runs pricing, distribution, guest communication and operations centrally on its own software. He started the company in 2016 after working in real estate private equity at KKR. The company, which its own biography of him calls a flexible accommodations brand, now also manages full hotels for owners under a technology-first model. In August 2025 it raised $40 million in growth capital led by Silver Lake Waterman, and in January 2026 it absorbed rival Mint House in an all-equity combination. Pedan also teaches data and AI for real estate development at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of Kasa, listed first in the company’s leadership team as Chief Executive Officer & Founder.
• Secured a $40 million growth investment led by Silver Lake Waterman in August 2025. Kasa said at the time that annual booking revenue had passed $100 million after more than doubling in a year.
• Led the January 2026 combination with Mint House, adding a portfolio of nearly 1,000 units that included 70 Pine in Lower Manhattan and markets such as Washington, D.C., Dallas, Nashville and Tampa.
• Early member of KKR’s Real Estate Private Equity group, where Kasa says he worked on $1.2 billion of hotel transactions and Columbia says he executed over $1.5 billion of transactions across property types.
• Early team member at the investment-management software company Juniper Square.
• Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP, co-teaching Leveraging Data and AI for Real Estate Development (Spring 2026).

Professional Journey

Pedan studied at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a computer science degree from Penn and an economics degree, with concentrations in finance and real estate, from The Wharton School. Both his company and Columbia describe a textbook e-commerce venture he built as a student. It handled more than $15 million in sales or transactions, though the two sources give it different names.

He went into real estate private equity. Columbia’s biography describes him as an investor at Walton Street Capital and as the eighth member of KKR’s Real Estate Private Equity group, which he helped build from a nascent platform. Kasa’s biography says he worked on hotel transactions totalling $1.2 billion at KKR and was involved in every hotel deal the firm closed during his tenure. He was also an early team member at Juniper Square, the investment-management software company for real estate funds. He later earned an MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

He founded Kasa in 2016. Kasa describes itself as a flexible accommodations brand, and a large part of its business is apartment-style stays in multifamily buildings. By August 2025 it said it was the exclusive short-term rental provider to half of the 20 largest multifamily owners in the US, and partner to institutions including Starwood Capital, Prudential and Greystar. It then moved into boutique hotels, which by August 2025 made up more than 35 of its 85-plus properties. That month Kasa announced a $40 million growth investment led by Silver Lake Waterman to fund its hospitality operating system, the software that runs pricing, guest support and operations across its portfolio. Pedan described it as “a better way to operate hospitality properties: one that’s lighter, smarter, and more profitable.”

In January 2026 Kasa combined with Mint House, a premium residential hospitality operator of nearly 1,000 units. Mint House shareholders exchanged their holdings for minority stakes in the combined company. Pedan described the deal to Skift as cashless and immediately accretive to EBITDA, and Mint House’s chief executive joined Kasa as a senior advisor. Kasa now calls itself an AI-native hotel management company. Pedan has argued in Fortune that AI will favour the largest platforms and the smallest specialist operators over the companies in between.

Alongside Kasa he is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he co-teaches a course on data and AI in real estate development. He has guest-lectured at Wharton, Cornell and NYU. At Stanford’s School of Engineering, students voted his lectures on PropTech the best guest lecture three years running. He lives in New York City.

Education

Stanford Graduate School of Business

MBA

The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

B.S. in Economics, concentrations in Finance and Real Estate

University of Pennsylvania

Computer Science (Kasa describes the degree as a B.S., Columbia as a B.A.S.)