Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2027: Zerolook

Zerolook

Headquarters: Zurich, Switzerland

CEO: Simone Lini

Website: Zerolook

Founding date: 2025

Investment: $1.9M

Pictured: Co-founders George Hadjiyiannis and Simone Lini

Zerolook is building an ML-based flight shopping API to solve look-to-book constraints. Its models predict fares and availability accurately enough to answer the exploding volume of AI and metasearch queries without touching live pricing systems, at a fraction of today's cost-per-search. Founded by former Kayak/Google executives and backed by Playfair, Zerolook has raised $1.9 million to date.

PhocusWire coverage:

• Zerolook secures $1.9M to address AI search volumes

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

Strategic goals for 2027

In 2027, we want Zerolook to become the layer airlines and OTAs use to answer AI-generated flight queries without bleeding cash on live pricing. Concretely: Move our first OTA integrations from pilot to production, onboard a small group of airlines and prove on real traffic that predicted fares can replace a large share of GDS and NDC calls with no loss in conversion. We are also growing the engineering learning team so the models keep pace with a query volume that is doubling faster than anyone budgeted for. The goal is simple: Make the look-to-book ratio irrelevant.

Key lessons learned since founding

Our first iteration was a B2C product called Navifare. The biggest lesson we learned: Do not attempt B2C travel unless you know exactly how you will acquire your first 100,000 users and can show lifetime value above acquisition cost before you scale. The second: Talk to your customers from day one, and don't fall in love with a problem unless many customers feel the same pain.