Vinayak Mahtani

Vinayak Mahtani is CEO of bnbme, a vacation rental management company he co-founded with his wife, Shilpa, in Dubai in 2018. The company partners with property owners who want to let out their homes for short-term rentals. bnbme then manages guests’ stays and provides hotel-style services including concierge and daily cleaning as well as bespoke setups.

Mahtani started the business through fate, after one of his own Dubai rental properties was damaged by a tenant who disappeared overnight. He and his wife turned this misfortune into a business opportunity by letting it as a holiday home to great success. Soon their friends were asking them do the same with their properties and from there bnbme was born. It now manages 150 holiday homes across Dubai and India and employs over 60 people. It won “best holiday homes rental company (Middle East)” in the 2022 International Travel Awards and “best B2C SME business of the year” in the UAE’s SME Awards 2022.

Born in Mumbai, Mahtani grew up in the UK and Germany. Hailing from a family of business owners, entrepreneurship is in his blood. He founded his first company, a footwear buying agency in India called Quality Inspection Services, in his late teens before establishing footwear retail chain Vi-Ga in the mid-2000s, opening 50 stores across India. Upon moving to Dubai in 2010, Vinayak moved into hospitality and led Unique Precise International, a hotel supply business, until 2021, when he stepped down in order to fully focus on bnbme’s growth as it plans to expand in Dubai and other markets.