It has been two years since PhocusWire named its Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2024.
As we prepare to announce our class of 2026, we are once again checking in with some of our standout alumni of Hot 25 Travel Startups from 2021,
2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Many have since undergone significant growth and transformation. Some, such Katanox, have secured major global
partnerships, while others such as Acai, Unravel and Blockskye have attracted fresh funding.
And some have made exits, including Weeva, which was acquired by Travalyst and Legends,
which was acquired by Fora.
Some
responses have been edited for brevity.
Katanox
Katanox provides financial infrastructure for the hospitality industry.
Head of marketing Joseph Vito DeLuca:
2025 has been a big year of growth. We’ve had numerous highlights over the course of the year (and have many more we’re eager to share once we can publicly). Some of the highlights we can mention include:
- Our partnership with the world’s biggest hotel chain, Wyndham, providing them with a combined distribution, payments and commission settlement technology platform.
- Expanding our payment services coverage to additional regions, such as the U.K. We’re now regulatory compliant
in the European Economic Area, U.K. and U.S. We’ll have more news on the fintech side, which we hope to announce soon.
- Onboarding additional regional hotel chains, such as Travelodge
- Strengthening and growing our existing partnerships
- In under a year, we’ve grown our business sevenfold, and our revenue has grown 600% year over year with a consistent gross merchandise value (GMV) growth of over 20% month over month. At the same time, total payment volume has surged at an exceptional
pace, compounding rapidly each month alongside our GMV growth.
- The biggest challenge I’m dealing with currently
is:
The travel industry will always be more volatile because of the direct impact of socioeconomic issues such as recessions and political policy.
Specifically in the hospitality space, rising operational costs, labor shortages and the need to integrate new technology to meet rapidly evolving guest expectations are among the most significant challenges we speak about with our partners.
These discussions help us shape our product and ensure that we deliver long-term solutions, enabling our partners to grow rather than simply reducing costs.
- My view on startup funding:
The bar has been raised. Investors are less interested in “growth at all costs” and much more focused on real infrastructure, regulatory moats and enterprise traction.
That environment is actually a tailwind for us. We’re not pitching a vision anymore; we’re showing signed contracts, recurring revenue and regulatory approvals in three major jurisdictions. The flight to quality plays directly in our favor, and we’re
seeing strong interest from top-tier (institutional) investors who understand the long-term infrastructure play we’re making.
Funding is more than just acquiring capital; you need to find people who will be in the trenches with you, helping your company grow beyond just writing you checks. Having a strong, mutually beneficial relationship between your startup and its investors
is critical to success.
- The technologies or innovations that
excite me the most are:
For us, it’s not AI in the abstract; it’s AI applied to financial operations at scale. We’re experimenting with ways to use machine learning for real-time fraud detection, reconciliation and risk scoring in hospitality payments.
The combination of regulated payment rails plus intelligent automation is where things get exciting. Imagine a hotel group reconciling thousands of bookings, commissions and payouts instantly, with anomalies flagged in real time. That’s what we’re building
towards, AI not as a gimmick but as the hidden engine that makes our financial infrastructure smarter and safer every day.
On the other side, we’re pioneering how AI agents can transact directly in hospitality. Conversational commerce is only possible if there’s a native financial and distribution backbone. That’s precisely what Katanox provides. AI doesn’t just recommend
a hotel; it can now close the booking and settle the payment in real time.
We’re bullish on embedded payment solutions. Payments are no longer a commodity in hospitality; they’re a core business driver.
The way forward is clear: integrated, compliant platforms that unify distribution and payments.
- Automating reconciliation between bookings and payments can reduce operational times by up to 60%.
- Standardized reporting across all channels ensures a single source of truth.
- Deep expertise in both payments and hospitality transforms payments from a cost center into a growth engine.
- This addresses the structural disconnect between how rooms are sold and how money is allocated.
By unifying payments and distribution, hotels gain:
- Higher conversion rates and cash flow visibility
- Lower risk
- Reduced operational complexity
- A guest journey that is frictionless and brand-first
- Better unit economics
When payments are integrated, compliant and connected to distribution, hotels can finally move beyond managing transactions and start unlocking efficiency, reducing risk and driving revenue growth.
Jerne
Jerne is where influential curators live, learn and earn with the world's leading experience providers.
CEO Tim Morgan:
Our company highlights for 2025 so far have been:
- Reaching more than 12,000 registered curators (influencers, content creators, bloggers, etc.) in 114 countries
- Providing those curators with an industry-first and proprietary Jerne Score to help
travel brands rank their unique sales and marketing value
- Growing our curators’ influenced travel bookings by 82% year-to-date, year over year
- The biggest challenge I’m dealing with currently is:
The biggest challenge (or what we see as the biggest opportunity) we are facing right now is helping travel brands navigate their digital-focused, human-centric distribution channels (such as social media, blogs and other content delivery mechanisms used
by influential individuals) in a world that is increasingly pushing travel brand’s products into the hands of fewer and fewer large, digital-focused, non-human centric distribution channels (such as the combination of AI chatbots, media platforms
and/or OTAs).
- My view on startup funding:
Funding for travel startups remains notoriously difficult; however, we see green shoots for those travel startups that are able to demonstrate product market fit particularly through proprietary technology and associated scalable recurring revenue.
For
the vast majority of travel startups, an idea is not good enough to raise funding; however, with advances in AI, product development and iteration have never been faster in order to build, test, iterate and start showing traction as quickly as possible.
- The technologies or innovations that
excite me the most are:
AI is everywhere and for good reason; we are only scratching the surface of its capabilities for travel distribution efficiency. What excites me most, and what we are iterating every day, is the intersection of AI and trusted travel curators (and the
communities of followers who value the trust in those human curators). Travel is emotional and personal—trust is very much a requirement in both.
The Host Co.
The Host Co. is a retail solution designed to help hosts sell their products and services in short-term rental spaces.
Co-founder and CEO Annie Sloan:
- We became a profitable company. In the startup world, that’s no small feat, and we’re incredibly proud of it.
- We hit one massive growth unlock: embedding Host Co stores directly inside property management software and direct booking sites. Now our stores come pre-loaded as a value-add for hosts and property managers. With direct booking adoption growing by
leaps and bounds, we’re not just watching the trend, we’re a software company powering it.
- The biggest challenge I’m dealing with currently
is:
One of the biggest misconceptions we still face is that we "don’t work with Airbnb." We absolutely do. Our platform complements Airbnb bookings, and earlier this year—when their new privacy policies and services rollout caused a wave of fear-mongering—it actually strengthened our position. We even launched a new tool that organizes Airbnb Resolution Center requests, and adoption has been huge. So rather than competing, we’re helping hosts get more out of Airbnb.
- My view on startup funding:
We’ve spent the past few years heads-down, focused on reaching profitability with a healthy EBITDA margin, so we haven’t been in the fundraising mix. But that changes soon: We’re about to open our next round. So…ask me in 2026! I’ll have a lot more
to say about where capital is flowing.
- The technologies or innovations that
excite me the most are:
TikTok Go and the rise of experience-first travel! Two thirds of Gen Z and millennials now book based onwhat they want to do rather than where they want to go. TikTok is shaping that discovery journey and turning experiences into the starting
point of travel decisions, and I am excited to see where this goes.
The second is AI-driven booking. Around 40% of travelers worldwide already use AI tools for planning trips. Search and recommendation algorithms are beginning to index across all booking sites—hotel, direct and short-term rental—which is radically changing
how travelers find and book stays.
Travlr ID
Travlr ID makes traveler profiles portable, secure and programmable. Travelers have full control over their data while enabling real-time, consent-based sharing with
booking tools, TMCs, suppliers and partners.
Founder and CEO Gee Mann:
Live production deployments with customers
- The biggest challenge I’m dealing with currently
is:
Time—everything in travel compared to other industries moves slowly. Adoption and innovation take time.
- My view on startup funding:
We are raising now to build and get funded in Europe. Doing that as a travel tech company is hard.
- The technologies or innovations that
excite me the most are:
Work DeepMind is doing in AI in medical research and discovery. It has real-world impact and unlocking human potential.
Turneo
Turneo provides a plug-and-play solution for innovative hotels and resorts so they can offer incredible in-destination experiences to their guests.
Co-founder and COO Fran Kauzlarić:
2025 was a groundbreaking year for us, as we expanded from being a primarily European company to having clients across the world in the U.S., South America and Asia. We also saw our customers achieve even more success with our product, with hotels generating
2-3x more experiences bookings than they did in 2024.
- The biggest challenge I’m dealing with currently
is:
The toughest challenge for us (but probably any growing company as well) is hiring the right people fast enough. When you are growing fast, you always need more people, but finding the right talent that raises the bar takes time. Striking the
right balance between speed and the time it takes to find the right people is always a challenge.
- My view on startup funding:
We closed a seed round with Bessemer Ventures Partners and our existing investor Underline Ventures at the end of 2024. What we've seen is that there is definitely a lot of interest in investing in AI, so if you are not an AI-business, you will have a
harder time raising money, but at the end of the day, investors still look at the same things—team, market and product.
- The technologies or innovations that
excites me the most are:
We're currently spending a lot of time working on deep agents. You can think of this as AI (like ChatGPT), but with the ability to solve complex multistep tasks. The travel industry is notoriously complex, and while we found that earlier versions of
AI could not grasp the complexity and ended up oversimplifying outputs, the new techniques and models are much more capable and are able to solve truly complex guest queries.
Check out other stories in our "Hot 25 Travel Startups: Where Are They Now" series: