The travel industry has gathered extensive data over the years about trips and transportation, and founders are using it to create every conceivable kind of AI travel startup. In fact, every word of this sentence is a link to a new AI travel tool. Now startups and incumbent travel tech companies are in a race to build one comprehensive tool that could plan and manage every part of your trip.
Airial is one of the contenders that’s banking on its ability to map out your entire travel experience end-to-end. At a surface level, here’s how it works: To begin, you can type in some details about any trip that you want to take, and the AI will create a plan for you, including your starting and ending points.
You can choose an instant trip function to quickly create a travel plan that includes flights, hotels, and transport across multiple cities. The platform also generates a daily itinerary for you to visit interesting places and eat at restaurants. You can specify your preferences while planning or modify them later after looking at the plan.
The interface shows your overall trip plan, and you can click on each phase to see the daily itinerary and the places AI has suggested for you to visit. You can click on each item to see an overview, reviews, location, and alternatives. Plus, the assistant can answer questions about each particular place for you.
Airial also shows a map view of all the places you are visiting that day, so you can gauge the distance between points. It also shows details like transfer time, wait time at train stations, and whether you can take a day trip to a place nearby.
Moreover, you can add a link to a blog, a TikTok, or a Reel, and add items mentioned by a creator to your itinerary. The tool also surfaces TikTok videos related to a city based on your prompts and details that you’ve provided, so if you don’t have a prior inspiration, you don’t have to look for it.
The company was founded by Archit Karandikar and Sanjeev Shenoy, who were college friends in India. Karandikar has held various engineering roles at Meta, Google, and Waymo, working on using AI in products. Shenoy worked at Meta primarily on the team that developed Instagram Reels.
The duo said that they’ve always had a passion for travel, so they wanted to build something in the sector. They described the Airial experience as working with your family’s travel agent.
“Pretty much all the other companies we know in the space are focused on creating a rough plan for you. With our models, we reason thoroughly over the logistics part of your trip with a focus on details. We integrate dozens of APIs and consider many parameters to map out your flights and trains, figure out connectivity time, and [determine the] proximity of activities from your hotel,” Karandikar told TechCrunch over a call.
Karandikar said that the startup’s value proposition to users is personalization and time saving. He said that if you are a vegetarian and mention that to the AI tool, it will only suggest suitable eating joints for you.
The company has based the training of its AI models on a paper by DeepMind researchers called AlphaGeometry. According to the startup, the paper describes an AI system that solves geometry problems. At its core, Airial is combining that inference method with LLMs to build travel plans.
The startup has raised $3 million in seed funding that was led by Montage Ventures with participation from South Park Commons, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India), and individual investors from Meta, UiPath, and Dropbox.
Daphne Che, a principal at Montage Ventures, said that the team’s technical understanding will give them an edge over other teams.
“I think every consumer who wants to plan travel will run into issues of [too] many options and variables to figure out. It is hard for a company just using LLMs straight up to solve these problems. Airial’s tech stack can reason over thousands of variables to figure out the best spots and transport for you while keeping your requirements in mind,” she said.
Airial said it has “tens of thousands of monthly visitors,” and the company is focusing on growing users rather than revenue. The company said it recently added features like trip sharing and collaborative trip building. It has also added cars and buses as options for multi-city transit. The travel tool has further added a social aspect, which allows users to view a friend’s trip and modify it.
In the coming months, the company wants to work on iOS and Android apps for its platform. The startup also wants to provide verticalized search for hotels, activities, and influencer videos.