Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2026: Buzz

Buzz

Headquarters: Singapore

CEO: Bell Beh

Website: Buzz

Founding date: 2020

Investment: $5M

Buzz is a travel payments and AI platform empowering Asian travelers to discover, book and pay seamlessly across borders. Starting with Muslim pilgrims traveling for Hajj and Umrah, and expanding through regional tourism corridors in the MENA region, Buzz focuses on helping underserved groups—including pilgrims, female solo travelers, and cultural explorers—navigate confidently in unfamiliar destinations. By combining embedded finance, AI-powered personalization and seamless payments, Buzz makes global travel more inclusive, secure and human-centered.

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Below, we asked co-founder and CEO Bell Beh to share her thoughts on next year's goals and what she has learned since founding Buzz.

Strategic goals for 2026

By 2026, our goal is to position Buzz as the leading travel payments and AI platform bridging Asia and the Middle East, in close collaboration with governments, tourism authorities and financial partners that share our vision for inclusive, tech-enabled travel. Through BuzzPay, we are scaling cross-border payment rails that power seamless transactions across the Hajj, Umrah and leisure tourism corridors, which we believe these corridors are highly underserved, underestimated and using BAE (Buzz AI Experience), AI Tour Guide continues to serve millions of Asian travelers.

As we expand, we’re focused on hitting key profitability and user-growth milestones that will prepare us for public-market readiness in the coming years. Working alongside our government partners, airlines and banks, we’re building a travel ecosystem that is personal, safe and financially empowering. Our mission is to ensure that every traveler—especially those from underserved communities—can navigate the world confidently, backed by trust, technology and purpose.

Lessons learned since founding

Since founding Buzz, I’ve learned that scaling across diverse markets takes more than great technology—it requires cultural intelligence, local trust and the right government partners. Every region teaches us something new about how people travel, pay and connect, and that human understanding has become the foundation of our innovation.

Expanding from Asia into the Middle East has reinforced one core belief: Innovation moves fastest when aligned with purpose and policy. Working alongside tourism boards, regulators and banks, we’ve learned that inclusion isn’t just a business advantage—it’s a responsibility. At Buzz, every product we build—from BuzzPay to BAE—reflects that mission: to make technology serve humanity, not replace it.”