Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2027: Chuuchuu

Chuuchuu

Headquarters: Antwerp, Belgium

CEO: Arne Nys

Website:  Chuuchuu

Founding date: November 2025

Investment: $150K

Pictured (L to R): Co-founders Arne Nys and Evert Heylen

Chuuchuu wants to get more people onto trains by taking the headache out of rail travel. Think of it as Flighty for trains: Our app helps travelers find the most reliable journeys, predicts disruptions before they happen and finds alternatives. Behind it sits real-time rail data from more than 11 European countries, accessible through our commercial API.

Below, we asked co-founder and CEO Arne Nys to share strategic priorities for 2027 and what has been learned since founding. 

Strategic goals for 2027

2027 is the year Chuuchuu becomes a rail companion for everyone, not just iPhone users. We're launching on Android, and we're rolling out our premium subscription with advanced delay predictions, live tracking and more. Underneath all of that, we'll keep doing what we set out to do: building the best rail assistant in Europe, the one you check before you even look at the departure board.

Key lessons learned since founding

Rail is a lot more complicated than it looks from the platform. Incumbent operators have little reason to let third parties sell their tickets, so building a business model around rail takes patience. The market is opening up, slowly, and it deserves a push. Data was the other big surprise. With flights, good data is easy to come by. With trains, it isn't. EU rules require operators to share their data openly, but some large countries still don't. A lot of our work has gone into finding, stitching together and structuring real-time data from hundreds of operators.