Our Story
Hospitality never lacked great people. It lacked the layer that tells them what happens next.
Every club already knows its members. Knownly exists because knowing is not the same as acting — and almost no software closes that gap on the floor.
Ignite Accelerator · GreenvilleMost Fundable — Summer 2026 Demo DayThe problem General Managers kept describing
Knownly's founder, David Leibell, spent nearly a decade in B2B software go-to-market — Salesloft, then an a16z-backed Series A, then automation and process design.
His biological father spent his career on a very different floor: high-end private clubs across South Carolina and Georgia. The same frustrations surfaced year after year. Managers couldn't see the property in real time. Process lived in people's heads or in systems that didn't talk. And something that should have happened simply didn't — usually discovered after a member noticed.
None of it was a people problem. It was a missing layer between what the club knew and what its team did next.
Sales solved this a decade ago
Sales teams once worked the same way. CRMs recorded what had happened; they did little to ensure what should happen next. Salesloft and its peers changed that by building a system of action on top of the system of record — and a category followed.
Hospitality already has systems of record: membership databases, POS, property management, reservations, tee sheets. What it has never had is the orchestration layer connecting all of it to the people delivering the experience.
The floor of a club needs what software built for the floor of a sales team. That insight became Knownly.
Validated with operators before a line of code
David cold-called roughly 35 General Managers across the Southeast and walked each of them through the idea. Several moved into deeper product conversations, and multiple operators asked to be early customers. The thesis started with one operator's experience; the market confirmed it wasn't his alone.
Knownly is built where those operators are — between Greenville, SC and Atlanta, GA. The company went through Launchpad Tech Ventures' Ignite accelerator in Greenville, where it was named Most Fundable at the Summer 2026 Demo Day.
