Horizonaut is a venture platform at the intersection of travel, hospitality and design.
It's inspired by the idea of exploring beyond the horizon. That instinct first led us into travel, and travel led us everywhere else.
Horizonaut was founded by Nikki De Marchi, a consultant, founder, and operator. Alongside strategy & transformation leadership roles, she has founded and operated businesses as a way to understand industries from the inside — because the only way to really know is to do it.
We started a travel advisory business deliberately — to understand the industry from the inside. Working with travellers, hotels, OTAs and local partners across East Africa, India and Southern Europe gave us a front-row seat to how people discover places, make decisions and create memories. And, crucially, a deep understanding of how hotels are positioned and sold — knowledge that most hotel developers never have.
That knowledge made building feel like a natural next step. We moved into hospitality — conceiving, designing and launching our own boutique hotels. But the real test came from operating them. Managing guests day to day and understanding what it actually takes to run a property changed how we thought about design — not as aesthetics, but as something that shapes every interaction a guest has with a place.
Others noticed. People who had stayed in our properties, or seen what we'd built, started asking us to do the same for them. That's how the design studio began — not as a plan, but as a natural extension of work people could see and touch.
Today, Horizonaut is a venture platform at the intersection of travel, hospitality and design. We treat every project as a live experiment — a chance to test ideas, learn by doing, and build ventures that last.