Startup Stage: Pintours is building AI-powered tours that adapt to every traveler

Pintours

Pintours has developed an AI platform that creates personalized tours by combining audio narration, navigation, augmented reality and conversational AI. The platform adapts to each traveler's location, interests and language while allowing guides to license their content and earn revenue from AI-powered versions of their tours.

The company distributes its technology through travel and mobility partners and generates revenue through revenue-sharing agreements and direct bookings, with ambitions to expand across travel, events and other location-based experiences.

What's your 30-second pitch to investors?

Every day, millions of people step into a city, a stadium, a museum, a back seat—and get a flat, one-size-fits-all version of a moment that could've been magic. Pintours fixes that. 

We're the AI layer for real-life experiences: Drop us into any place and we turn it into a personalized, context-aware journey across four modalities—audio narration, navigation, AR [augmented reality] and a conversational AI guide you can ask anything. The same street, the same tour, the same ride—but a foodie couple, a family with three kids and a solo history buff each get a completely different experience. People are already out there having experiences. We make every single one of them better, and we do it at infinite scale.

Simply put, Pintours is the AI that powers real life experiences, all while paying real guides and businesses!

Describe both the business and the technology aspects of your startup.

The technology is the fun part. At its core, Pintours is a physical-AI engine that reads intent, location, budget and context in real time and composes an experience on the fly—then orchestrates it. It talks live to transport, venues, restaurants and ticketing so the experience doesn't just sound good, it happens: The ride shows up, the table's booked, the next stop is queued. One narration script, instantly multilingual, so a single guide can reach the whole planet.

The business is just as deliberate. We're horizontal, not a single-city tour app. We make money through revenue share with the platforms and operators who already own the customer—mobility apps, online-travel players, attractions, venues—plus direct booking. 

And we're creator-first by design: human guides record their stories, routes, even their music, and they earn every time their knowledge powers a journey, whether they're standing there or fast asleep. AI doesn't replace the guide. It clones the magic and pays them for it.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths: A horizontal engine that works across travel, mobility, events and entertainment, live revenue and marquee distribution partners, multilingual AI that scales guiding without scaling headcount and a founder who grew up inside this industry.

Weaknesses: Our footprint today is more concentrated than our ambition—we're scaling content and team as fast as the partnerships demand, not faster.

Opportunities: The global experiences market is enormous and still stubbornly analog. Major sporting and cultural events are perfect wedge moments. And AI is finally good enough to deliver a great guide to everyone, everywhere, at once.

Threats: Travel is a famously brutal category, incumbents can chase adjacent features and any platform play carries content and distribution dependencies. We respect all three.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspectives?

For travelers: Today's experiences are either expensive and rigid (a human tour on someone else's clock) or flat and forgettable (a pamphlet, a static audio file). Nothing adapts to where you actually are, what you actually care about, or the language you actually speak.

For the industry: Quality guiding doesn't scale. Human guides are costly, inconsistent and don't speak forty languages. Operators leave money on the table; distributors are stuck selling thin inventory. We hand both sides personalized, multilingual, always-on guiding—and we turn every guide's expertise into an asset that earns around the clock.

Now that the product is built, what's your strategy for customer acquisition?

We don't fight for customers one download at a time—we meet them inside the experiences they're already buying. Distribution deals with mobility and online travel platforms put us in front of travelers at the exact moment of intent. Operator and venue integrations embed us directly into the journey. And major tentpole events hand us concentrated, time-boxed demand to land a new market and prove the model fast—picture walking out of a packed stadium straight into a curated neighborhood night, transport and dinner already lined up.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

The tours and experiences market is one of the largest, fastest-growing corners of travel—and the least personalized. We didn't validate that on a slide. We validated it with live partnerships and real bookings, in real cities, with real travelers, until the run-rate told us the same thing the founder's gut did: Both sides of this market have been waiting for exactly this.

How and when will you make money?

We already do. Revenue share on experiences booked and delivered through our partners, plus direct booking—roughly $7M in annualized run-rate today. And here's the part we're proud of: That number isn't propped up by one-off event spikes. The big events are still upside we haven't fully tapped. What we're running on now is durable, repeatable demand—which is exactly the foundation you want before the fireworks.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

This one's personal. I'm Lou Chatta, founder and CEO—and I grew up watching my father guide travelers for forty years. I saw firsthand what a great guide does to a trip, and I saw how little of that magic ever scaled past the people lucky enough to be standing next to him. Pintours is my answer to that. Before this I spent seven years in Apple's Special Projects Group, living at the seam where hardware, software and big zero-to-one bets meet. Pintours was selected for TechCrunch Disrupt 2025's Startup Battlefield 200. Also winners of Travel Tech's most innovative company award. 

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Based on the principles Lou learned at Apple, diversity and inclusion is core in the products we make and how we think about our team and customers.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Refusing to be small. The market desperately wants to file you under "another travel app," and the discipline is in proving—with real partners, real revenue, real journeys—that this is something bigger: an AI layer for real life. Building the thing is hard. Making people see the thing is harder.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact. Why are you going to be one of the lucky ones

Because we're not playing the game everyone else loses. Most travel startups try to win the same customer on the same transaction against incumbents with bottomless pockets. We don't compete for that transaction—we make it better and ride the distribution that already exists. We're not betting the company on one city or one event; we're a horizontal layer that gets more valuable with every place, partner and guide we add. Live revenue and marquee partners this early isn't luck. It's the proof.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

More live partners, materially wider geographic reach, pipeline deals turned into real deployments and revenue well beyond today's—with the big global events as upside rather than the load-bearing wall. We want to be the obvious answer when any company asks, "How do we make our customers' real-world experience unforgettable?"

What is your endgame? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

To be the default AI layer for experiences, everywhere. A company built for that scale points naturally toward going public—though a strategic acquisition by a major travel, mobility or platform player is a realistic outcome given how cleanly we slot into their roadmaps. Either way, we're optimizing for one thing: owning the category, not catching a quick exit.