Building the Future of On-Demand Rest: A Vision for Nappr
Team: Jared Lerner (Stern ‘13), Matt Stewart, Jeff Nguyen, Tahir Ramzan, Jerzy Zielinski
About the Venture:Â Nappr converts unused daytime hotel inventory into short stays that allow travelers and workers to rest during the day. The service offers on-demand bookings ranging from a few hours to half-day use.
By Jared Lerner, ZZZEO of Nappr
I’ve always believed that rest is one of the most undervalued ingredients of a healthy and productive life. Whether you’re a traveler crossing time zones, a parent juggling a full day of responsibilities or a professional moving from meeting to meeting, sleep and recovery matter… a lot. Yet in modern and travel hubs, there are surprisingly few places where someone can comfortably pause and recharge during the day when they need to the most.
That realization is what led me to build Nappr.
Nappr is designed to unlock the enormous amount of unused hotel capacity that exists during daytime hours and makes it available to travelers who need a place to rest for a few hours. My goal is simple: to make healthy rest accessible whenever and wherever people need it so that nobody has to go more than 10 minutes to find it.
Where I See Nappr in One Year
Over the next year, our focus will be on strengthening the foundation of our platform. We’re working hard to expand our hotel network across major travel markets while improving the product experience for both travelers and hotel partners, and some of the milestones we’re working on right now include:
- Growing our inventory of partner hotels in major global cities, which is currently at 5,300 hotels across 35 countries
- Improving same-day booking and instant reservation capabilities by leveraging AI to integrate with hotel property management systems (PMS) and revenue management systems (RMS), and
- Increasing awareness that daytime hotel stays are a practical option for cruise travelers, medical professionals, touring musicians and millions of other busy people. Â
I want Nappr to become the first place people think of when they need a comfortable place to recharge between commitments. Whether someone just landed from a red-eye flight, needs a quiet place to prepare for a meeting or wants to reset during a long travel day, Nappr should make that experience effortless.
Success over the next year means demonstrating strong product-market fit, seeing repeat usage from travelers and proving to hotel partners that daytime stays can unlock meaningful new revenue from rooms that would otherwise sit empty.
Where I See Nappr in Five Years
Looking further ahead, our vision is for Nappr to become the premier global operating system for on-demand rest.
Hotels around the world have billions of dollars in unused daytime capacity, just sitting there empty. Our goal is to unlock that capacity through a global platform that allows travelers to book a room within minutes, wherever they happen to be.
Five years from now, I hope Nappr will:
- Offer tens of thousands of partner hotels across major global travel markets
- Integrate directly with airlines, trains and travel platforms
- Enable truly on-demand bookings, similar to ride-hailing apps, and
- Become the default platform travelers use when they need rest during the day by allowing people to always find a place to rest within 10-15 minutes of their location.
Just as people can summon transportation with a tap on their phone, we believe the future traveler will expect rest to be just as accessible.
Lessons from the NYU Entrepreneurs Challenge
Participating in the NYU Entrepreneurs Challenge has been an incredibly valuable experience for me as a founder. And it’s also been great to reconnect with my Alma Mater and work directly with the Berkley Center! (Stern MBA class of 2013).
The program has pushed me to think carefully about how we articulate Nappr’s vision while staying disciplined about testing our assumptions. Through mentorship and conversations with other founders, I’ve been reminded that building a great company requires balancing bold vision with rigorous validation.
One of the biggest takeaways for me has been clarity: Nappr isn’t just another booking platform. We’re building a new layer of travel infrastructure centered around human well-being.
The Challenge has also reinforced something I care deeply about: customer obsession. If we focus relentlessly on serving both travelers and hotel partners, the product and the business will naturally improve.
The Road Ahead
We’re still early in this journey, but the opportunity is enormous. Every day, millions of travelers move through cities and airports looking for a place to recharge. At the same time, hotels have significant unused capacity during the day.
Nappr sits at the intersection of those two realities.
My mission is to make sure that wherever someone is in the world, a quality place to rest is always within reach.
The NYU Entrepreneurs Challenge has helped sharpen that vision and my team and I are incredibly excited about the road that lies ahead.
