YGO
Headquarters: Berlin, Germany
CEO: Julian Kögel
Website: YGO
Founding date: 2023
Investment: €10M+
Pictured (L to R): Co-founders Willi Ibbeken, Sebastian Kreutzberger and Julian Kögel
YGO is building the data layer to make travel AI-ready. Travel product data sits in silos, unreadable for AI; YGO enriches, structures and rewrites it into one semantic standard and adds the context an AI needs to decide: which facts matter, how reliable they are and where they come from. For tour operators, airlines and OTAs, this means higher conversion and far less manual work.
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Below, we asked YGO co-founder and CEO Julian Kögel to share strategic priorities for 2027 and what has been learned since founding.
Strategic goals for 2027
In 2027, YGO becomes the standard for how AI reads and books travel, built together with our partners. Today it runs on their own channels: AI search, recommendations, agents. Next year we bring the same context into the large AI assistants, so a traveler asking there gets a correct answer and a bookable product from our partners. We roll the platform out across Europe and turn our dataset into the number one reference source for travel content. Whoever wants to be found by AI in 2027 goes through YGO.
Key lessons learned since founding
We started YGO by building our own frontends and testing what LLMs can do with travel. The LLMs were ready, but the industry's data was the problem. As a team that had built travel infrastructure before, we knew where it breaks: the same hotel described differently in every system, missing facts, outdated content. No AI can give a solid answer on that foundation. We made the data the product. That decision became the company.
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