CEO Spotlight: Naren Shaam of Omio

Standing in a train station in Paris in 2010, Naren Shaam hit a snag: The SNCF mobile website wasn’t allowing him to purchase a ticket to Amsterdam.

He walked to a bank, withdrew cash and waited 45 minutes in line to buy the ticket he’d planned to pay for in seconds on his phone.

He never intended to become an entrepreneur, but at that moment the concept for Omio was born.

He wondered, “How can this large an industry not be under a unified technical platform?” Shaam, the founder and CEO of Omio, told PhocusWire. “What is the opportunity there? That was the first moment that I was like, ‘Oh wow, this is a mission worth pursuing.’”

Now, more than a decade after the company’s launch, Shaam is navigating an artificial intelligence (AI) transformation as he continues to combat the innate fragmentation challenge of multimodal travel.

The founder shared his views on the technology, his plans to scale the company and what he’s learned leading Omio in a CEO Spotlight interview with PhocusWire.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

How is AI changing the way that travelers actually experience multimodal journeys from where you sit?

AI accelerates the solution of all three layers of multimodal travel—including supply, data and customer understanding—but it doesn't replace the underlying complexity. A human still needs to go from point A to point B and deal with all the complexities of this multimodal transport, and operationally things can go wrong—luggage can get lost and all that. So, AI doesn't solve for the live operational complexity, but it does accelerate the technical solutions for each of those layers. 

I hope the vision of true multimodal transport—or I would call it true natural transport across all modes of transport—comes to life much faster because of AI.

Let's dive a little further into your AI strategy. You've launched a ChatGPT app. What are the returns looking like so far? And what comes next?

It’s still very early with the ChatGPT app.

We want to move where customers are moving. We are working on making sure all the supply in the world is on Omio. This is the core of our value proposition.

We're in 47 countries. We're going to be in 70 countries by next year, and I hope 100 in the following year. Within these countries, we supply everything, not just trains—we do flights, buses, airport transfers, ferries. Any customer that needs to move from one place to the other, Omio is going to be there. 

We’re translating that information into the world of AI. In a way, we want to be the MCP [model context protocol] for all of these companies that can evolve to produce beautiful consumer products. We will build our own consumer products as well, but ... 100% of eyeballs are not going to go through only the Omio brand. 

It sounds like you're scaling a significant amount in the coming year or two, so where do you want the company to be in the next 5 years?

Five years is a long time with the pace at which things change. But I want Omio to be the largest platform for transportation globally. 

I hope that the multimodal search is natural to customers. Agents are helping customers solve these problems, and I believe Omio will play a fundamental part in building the infrastructure to make those solutions come to life. 

What's the biggest operational challenge been across the different markets, operators, transport systems that you're working with?

The first operational challenge was COVID. 

We launched the product in 2015, and in the first phase of my Omio journey, we scaled from zero to 30 countries. But we didn't go global. I always wondered if we were a global player like Airbnb, what would the network effects have been had we already had the inventory? So somehow COVID cut that, having all the supply in the world, and then it brought its own challenges of capital, etc. So we needed to innovate the business model, we needed to get profitable and now we're back into an expansion path. 

From an operational perspective, that is the single biggest wrench in a fast-moving flywheel that we had to deal with. 

But other than that, the real operational challenges involve the unification of all transport inventory.

The ground-level challenges include that many companies don't have good station infrastructure, station databases—they don't have APIs or a way to pool data with low latency. So unifying that data layer, normalizing the second layer, where you bring intelligence, understanding where customers want to travel, maybe even give recommendations. 

And then the third layer is how can customers understand the complexity of this industry? And I don't know if we want the customers to appreciate how complex it is. But we do want customers to be educated that it's not the same as buying a hotel or a flight. We can make it seamless, and Omio can be a trusted place where you can come and buy. 

So I think those are probably the more operational challenges—and inserting AI into all three layers, what we are seeing now is just an acceleration in solving all of those three layers now.

Omio has started to increasingly power travel experiences behind the scenes with APIs, including partnerships like the one with TUI. How important is the B2B side of the business becoming strategically?

B2B is very important for us. 

In general, the core of Omio is that we have access to a lot of supply. So, ultimately, these are fixed-cost businesses. Trains operate no matter what, whether the occupancy rate is 80% or 60% or 40%, there's a train running, and a bus is running. Our goal is to fill the seats, so the incremental cost of distribution becomes lower.

The strategy we have adopted is very similar to Samsung's LCD and TV: They make the LCD technology that they license to others, but they also have the TV brand. 

Our strategy is very simple: We want to power more B2B so that we can increase more transactions onto ground transport, but at the same time, our consumer businesses are equally growing, launching more markets and most of our innovation comes also from the consumer brands. 

We test it, it works, we take it to B2B, or sometimes vice versa. So, B2B is essential for us.

It’s also a way for us to evolve with the world of AI. Today, Google and one or two players [are] very dominant in travel distribution. Three years from now, it could be two, three different players. As long as our B2B APIs, MCPs, white-label products are technologically the most advanced, we are always the first point for licensing this data to where customers are evolving. 

How big of an issue is data fragmentation for you, in general?

I think that this is the biggest reason why we exist. Without it, there's no need for Omio.  

Because [the sector] is so fragmented in ground transport: Trains in Japan, completely different network. Trains in India, completely different network. Buses in Brazil—there are 200-plus bus companies. 

Across all transport, we map to 10,000 to 12,000 companies.

There's no central repository of all transport companies in the world. So if we can bring all of these 12,000 companies into a single, 200-millisecond data layer API that we can power our own products or consumer products with… I would say fragmentation is the sole reason why we exist.

Can you share about the moments that have shaped you as a leader through your time at Omio and through your career?

I would describe my journey as a CEO as in three phases: The first one is from 2015, when we launched. The product was beautiful. It is still beautiful—but the product market fit was natural. So we had a natural growth where we expanded to 30-plus regions in Europe. Then we rebranded. We bought a business called Rome2Rio. 

The second phase was when COVID hit. We had a few weeks of cash—and then we lost 98% of our business, so we went into heavy restructuring, making the economics of the business work, investing in the right things so we could grow again, making hundreds of decisions through that.

In the third phase—after COVID—the business bounced back two times bigger than pre-COVID, and we're currently about six times bigger. And the travel industry as a whole is definitely not six times bigger, so we've taken a lot of market share. 

Each of those phases have been very fundamental to my personal growth and learning.

The phase I'm in now is more about the technical transformation in the AI world. AI is going to pose decades of change in consumer behavior, and I want to make sure Omio is there. I believe in very large transformations like AI, either you're going to be disrupted or you're the disruptor, and I know exactly which hat I want to wear.