Travel startup Layla, backed by FirstMinute Capital, M13, Booking.com co-founder Andy Phillips, Skyscanner co-founder Barry Smith, and Paris Hilton, today announced that it has acquired AI-powered itinerary creation bot Roam Around.
Roam Around was founded last year by Shie Gabbai, a former Google employee who worked on Waze. The company has raised $1 million from investors including FLYR.com and Jason Calacanis. As part of the deal, her five-person team from Roam Around will join her Layla. To date, Roam Around has built her 10 million itineraries and 500,000 people visit the site each month.
Last year, Layla rolled out an AI-powered bot to the public that pulls knowledge from a variety of sources, including Booking.com and Skyscanner, to help users plan their trips. Jeremy Jauncey, founder of travel agency Beautiful Destinations, is a co-founder of the startup. That's why Layla leverages the vast library of content provided by travel creators to present unique views and clips to users as they search for destinations.
Layla co-founder Saad Saeed said the company believes Roam Around complements Layla's offerings with its itinerary creation expertise and partnerships with TripAdvisor, Kayak, Viotr, GetYourGuide and others.
“Roam Around is one of the fastest growing travel AI startups. They are experiencing explosive popularity across their itinerary products and capturing the attention of many customers. We've been successful in this, so we really complement each other's strengths,” he said in a call with TechCrunch.
“We've focused on the best flight prediction models, hotels, partnerships with Skyscanner and Booking.com. They've focused on itineraries that integrate Viateur and all their restaurants. So , the idea was to combine the best of both worlds.”
Layla has already started integrating Roam Around's products. So users can get better itinerary data while using Layla. Meanwhile, Layla has placed his bot on his Roam Around site.
Image credits: Layla/Roam Around
Said said the startup intends to gradually phase out the Roam Around brand and fully integrate it with Layla.
Travel startups like Kayak and Expedia have launched GPT plugins. Meanwhile, his GuideGeek tool from Matador Network shows real-time flight details. Like Layla, Matador also wants to embed influencer videos in its results. In India, navigation company MapMyIndia is backing a startup called Kogo. Kogo seeks to build AI-based products that help users with their travel experiences, with a focus on localizing the experience.