Layla has secured a €3 million seed investment led by Firstminute Capital, with other investors including Booking.com co-founder Andy Phillips, Skyscanner co-founder Barry Smith, and Paris Hilton. The company plans to monetize through fee sharing for transactions and is also considering personalized advertising opportunities. Layla differentiates itself by providing diverse content and a recommendation engine, and is developing vision tech to answer queries based on visual similarities. Despite competition from other AI-based travel solutions, investors believe that even a small lead in AI integration can be significant in the travel industry.
Key takeaways:
- UK-based startup Layla has launched an AI chatbot and app that suggests new travel destinations and helps with bookings. The company was founded by Jeremy Jauncey, founder of Beautiful Destinations, and Saad Saeed, co-founder of Flink.
- Layla has partnered with Booking.com and Skyscanner to provide hotel and flight options. The startup is starting with a fee sharing model for these transactions as a revenue stream, but is open to exploring other monetization methods such as personalized advertising.
- The company has secured a €3 million seed investment led by Firstminute Capital, with other investors including Booking.com’s co-founder Andy Phillips, Skyscanner co-founder Barry Smith, and Paris Hilton.
- Layla differentiates itself by surfacing different kinds of content and not having a website-like structure. It uses large language models to parse queries and display answers, and has built its own recommendation engine. It is also developing vision tech to answer queries like “show me destinations which look like Mars”.