A dying Jodhpur boot led two founders to start sweeping hotel rooms for hidden cameras

At home in Jodhpur during a break in his final year of mechanical engineering, Aditya Upadhyay went looking for a pair of handmade Chelsea boots. The city has deep roots in polo and royal patronage, and the Jodhpuri Chelsea boot takes its name from the place, so he assumed the search would be short. It was not. Global fashion houses were selling the style for hundreds of dollars a pair, while in the city that gave it its name he could find only one or two struggling artisans still making it by hand.

That discovery became La August, a footwear venture Upadhyay started with his school friend Gautam Singh, and the two of them began travelling across Rajasthan to Jaipur and Udaipur, meeting leather vendors and learning the manufacturing trade on almost no capital. They were budget travellers, staying in modest hotels, and it was there that the business they now run began to take shape without either of them intending it. Prices agreed at booking were not honoured at the desk. Rooms looked nothing like their listings. Staff behaviour was unpredictable and occasionally hostile. Then, at one property, another guest found a hidden camera in her room.

Hotel safety fails at exactly the point where a guest has no power to check

"The entire hotel erupted into chaos," said Aditya Upadhyay, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The QueerTech Verifications. "Guests were terrified. The management denied everything. The police were called, and nothing was resolved. It stayed with me."

The pattern kept repeating in an unrelated part of their lives. Searching for a designer who could realise their vision for the boot, the two founders spent months in conversation with people from the fashion world, including graduates of the National Institute of Fashion Technology, many of them women who travelled constantly for shows and sourcing trips. Discussions that began with leather and construction kept drifting towards which cities felt safe to visit alone, which properties people quietly avoided, and which precautions had simply become routine.

Upadhyay’s argument is that the failure is structural. A guest cannot inspect the space behind a mirror, cannot confirm that a deadbolt has been left untampered with, and cannot establish in advance whether front-desk staff have been trained to treat every traveller with basic courtesy. All of those conditions are set before anyone checks in. "Every one of those things happens, or fails to happen, before the guest reaches the property, entirely outside their control," he explained. "So we built the verification to happen before the guest gets there too."

The verifiable evidence on the scale of the problem is thinner than the fear it produces, which is itself the founders’ central point. On booking fraud, the American Hotel & Lodging Association found that 23% of consumers had been misled by third-party travel resellers, amounting to $5.7 billion in fraudulent and misleading hotel booking transactions in a single year.

On hidden cameras, the most-cited research covers short-term rentals: a 2025 survey of more than 1,000 Americans by the property investment firm IPX1031 found that 47% said they had discovered a camera in a rental property, up from 25% two years earlier, with one in five of those finds in a bedroom or bathroom. For hotels specifically, no comparable industry-wide tracking exists at all, which means the honest answer to how often it happens is that nobody knows. That absence of independent measurement is the market Upadhyay believes he is entering.

A concert-sized launch plan collapsed against a bank balance

The first version of the company was far more ambitious, and considerably less realistic. Upadhyay and Singh designed a full consumer marketplace, closer to Booking.com in shape, in which every listed property would be physically verified before it appeared at all. It carried an AI itinerary planner that mapped verified places to stay and eat within a stated budget, an SOS and late-night check-in feature allowing a delayed guest to alert both the property and a small group of trusted contacts, and a community layer connecting travellers with local guides.

To launch it, they looked at the live events economy, where the numbers genuinely are extraordinary. A report by EY-Parthenon and BookMyShow Live estimated that Coldplay’s two Ahmedabad concerts generated a total economic impact of ₹641 crore, roughly $77 million, including a direct ₹392 crore to the city’s economy, with hotel prices rising three to six times after the shows were announced. The plan was to become the exclusive ticketing partner for a major international show in India and bundle tickets with verified stays, transfers and city guides, making account creation mandatory to buy a ticket and reserving premium perks for those who booked accommodation through the platform.

It needed millions of dollars, and the founders had none. "We come from Jodhpur, from a modest, middle-class background, with no family history in business and no existing network of investors," Upadhyay said. Hundreds of personalised outreach messages went out. A small number of investors engaged warmly, and none of those conversations converted. "The investment ecosystem is heavily concentrated around whatever is trending in a given year, whether that is large language models, deep tech or defence technology," he noted. "A founder without a pedigree from a small number of well-known institutions has to work far harder just to get a real conversation, regardless of how large the problem they are solving actually is."

So they abandoned the marketplace and rebuilt the company as a business-to-business verification standard, something leaner that two people could start without institutional capital behind them.

An AI studio started by accident now pays for the safety business

The money keeping The QueerTech Verifications alive comes from an entirely separate venture the pair started for reasons that had nothing to do with hotels. Needing a marketing campaign for the boot business and receiving quotes in the tens of thousands of dollars, Upadhyay used free cloud credits for a new AI video tool to produce a two-minute film on a few hundred dollars. That became Quantum Leap, an AI-native production studio which, by the founders’ account, began by serving local businesses and independent creators who could not afford conventional video production, and later delivered more than 200 scripts for a Fortune 500 client inside 15 days.

Quantum Leap now funds the verification business entirely. "As The QueerTech Verifications has no funding and no outside investment, Quantum Leap is helping us sustain it," Upadhyay stated. "Otherwise the business would have evaporated." Singh, who serves as Chief Operating Officer, learned AI video production in a matter of days to take over operations during that delivery, having come to technology late after a commerce education and a small handicrafts venture run while still at school.

Certification only means something if it can be taken away

The product itself is deliberately unglamorous. A hotel registers, uploads municipal trade licences, fire safety certificates, police clearances, ownership deeds and staff identity records, all of which are digitally checked before an audit is scheduled at all. The property then pays a fee and books a date, and a trained independent auditor visits in person.

The inspection runs across three domains. Auditors assess staff conduct through direct observation and discreet interaction, checking whether guests are treated with consistent courtesy and whether any intimidating behaviour surfaces at the desk. They test primary electronic locks and secondary deadbolts, window security on lower floors, emergency exits, fire equipment and lighting levels in corridors, stairwells and parking areas. Then they sweep for recording devices using optical detection to catch lens curvature, radio frequency scanning for transmitting signals, and non-linear junction detection capable of finding circuitry inside walls and furniture even when a device is switched off. Every step is time-stamped and geo-tagged, with photographic evidence uploaded live, which Upadhyay said is the mechanism that stops a hotel paying quietly for an approval that never happened.

Certification lasts six months and is published on a public page where any traveller can check what was verified and when. The enforcement mechanism is the part the founders consider genuinely novel. "If a serious complaint is confirmed after certification, the badge is revoked and the property is delisted the same day," he said. His reference point is the restaurant world, where a Michelin star creates commercial value precisely because it can be withdrawn, forcing swift resolution when standards slip. Hotel safety has never had an equivalent, which is why a guest with a complaint at a budget property ends up in a customer care loop lasting weeks while the hotel carries no consequence at all.

Revenue depends on hotels accepting that safety sells

The model charges hotels in tiers. A basic audit covers shared spaces, staff assessment and a device sweep, designed for properties that cannot pause operations for a full inspection. The full tier covers every guestroom. Failed audits produce a detailed remediation report and a re-inspection at reduced cost, and the six-month expiry creates recurring revenue as staff and conditions change.

Three further streams sit further out: detection hardware sold to hotels for routine sweeps between audits and to travellers directly, paid training programmes for hotel teams, and an API licensing model allowing booking platforms to surface certification status inside their own listings at the moment a traveller is choosing. The sequencing is intentional, since selling equipment before the certification carries credibility would invert the logic of the whole business.

The company is entirely bootstrapped and has no revenue yet, with a working end-to-end prototype covering registration, audit and public verification, a podcast built to grow awareness, and a strategy of starting with hotels already marketing themselves as safety-conscious and women-friendly, on the reasoning that they have the most to gain from proving a claim they already make. The founders are candid that scaling requires a technical team they cannot yet hire, detection equipment they cannot yet buy in volume, and an auditor workforce they cannot yet train.

"We are not claiming we can eliminate every bad actor in a trillion-dollar global industry," Upadhyay said. "Nobody honestly can. What we are building is the first independently verified safety standard the hospitality industry has never had."