Hospitality Startup SevenRooms Hires First-Ever General Counsel

SevenRooms Inc., a software startup serving the hospitality industry, announced Tuesday its hire of Aja Baxter as its first-ever general counsel.

Baxter joined SevenRooms after spending more than a year as the top lawyer for Spring Care Inc., a telehealth provider known as Spring Health. Prior to that he spent almost a decade as general counsel for co-working startup Breather Products Inc. and education technology company EducationDynamics LLC.

“Leveraging my past experiences with other high-growth organizations, I look forward to developing a new legal function for SevenRooms,” Baxter said in a company statement.

Aja Baxter

SevenRooms

SevenRooms serves as a so-called hospitality intranet or digital maître d’ for hotels, restaurants, and clubs to gather data on coveted customers, according to a 2015 profile by Bloomberg. SevenRooms made news this year for offering new employees two weeks of paid vacation before they joined the New York-based company, an incentive to recruit workers in a competitive job market.

Founded in 2011, SevenRooms has received financial backing from Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa Fund, Comcast Corp.’s venture capital arm, and others. The company has raised $75 million to date and predominantly uses Cooley for outside counsel, a spokeswoman said. Cooley took the lead for SevenRooms on a $50 million Series B fundraising round in mid-2020.

SevenRooms said it works with several high-profile dining, entertainment, and hospitality clients, including the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, Dubai’s Jumeirah Group LLC, Live Nation Entertainment Inc., Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group International Ltd., MGM Resorts International, Topgolf International Inc., and Wolfgang Puck Worldwide Inc.

Baxter is tasked with overseeing the strategy and performance of SevenRooms’ legal function, a group that “will be an integral part of strategic decision-making as the company continues to scale” it said.

“Additionally, as global data privacy regulations continue to evolve, Baxter will play a key role in helping SevenRooms ensure that all business initiatives undertaken by the company are aligned with changing regulations and informed by local and international data privacy laws,” the company said.