Startup Stage: Visaible wants to help hotels improve AI search visibility

Visaible

Founded in late 2025, Visaible helps hotels understand and manage how they appear in AI-generated travel recommendations. Its platform monitors hotel visibility across major AI assistants, analyzes how properties compare with competitors and identifies opportunities to improve their positioning.

Beyond monitoring, Visaible uses autonomous AI agents to implement approved changes to hotel websites and marketing systems, then measures their impact on AI visibility. The startup operates on a per-property subscription model, with plans ranging from monitoring to automated optimization.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Travelers are moving from search engines to AI assistants, but hotels cannot see whether ChatGPT recommends them, what it says or why a competitor wins. For a few hundred dollars per property each month, Visaible gives each hotel an autonomous AI agent that monitors the major AI platforms, identifies what needs to change and executes the fixes across its digital systems. AI assistants often send travelers directly to hotel websites, bypassing 15%-25% OTA commissions, so one or two additional direct bookings can cover the monthly Visaible subscription.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Business

As travel discovery shifts to AI, hotels risk being overlooked without knowing how they appear or why competitors are recommended. Visaible gives each property an always-on, autonomous agent to monitor and automatically optimize its AI presence, helping drive more direct bookings. Customers choose monitoring, optimization or full autopilot execution for a few hundred dollars per property monthly.

Technology

Visaible closes the loop between identifying opportunities, executing improvements and measuring what works.

• Observe: Continuously test traveler questions across major AI assistants, tracking hotel visibility, positioning, descriptions, accuracy, competitors and cited sources.
• Diagnose: Benchmark against competitors and prioritize ready-to-use improvements to content, structured data and paid placements.
• Act: Auto-Pilot’s AI agents execute approved changes across hotel websites and marketing systems, with customer-visible audit logs and human approval for brand-sensitive changes.
• Learn: Retest to measure visibility gains, improve agent performance and build proprietary evidence of what works across hotels, markets and AI models.

Give us your SWOT analysis of the company.

Strengths

• Vertical specialization: The metrics, prompt library, benchmarks and recommendations are hotel-specific. Generalist AI visibility tools were largely built for other sectors and can miss the signals that matter in travel.
• Proprietary evidence base: Millions of AI responses and citations across hotels in five markets show what improves visibility in travel, which differs measurably from other industries.
• Competitive benchmarking: Hotels can compare their performance with their actual competitor set, rather than a generic cross-industry benchmark.
• Execution, not just reporting: Hotel teams are stretched, so a product that can implement an approved fix is more valuable than one that only identifies the problem.
• Clear customer economics: For many hotels, one or two incremental direct bookings a month can cover the subscription.

Weaknesses

• Small team: Sales, product and delivery remain founder-led, which limits how quickly Visaible can onboard new customers.

Opportunities

• From visibility to agentic booking infrastructure: Visaible can control and optimize hotels’ accuracy, competitiveness and bookability as AI moves beyond recommendations to comparing live availability, selecting properties and completing bookings.
• From insights to autonomous execution: Autopilot can continuously manage the entire AI visibility channel across hotel portfolios, automating agency and internal marketing work.
• Expansion: Expand within existing hotel-group customers and five markets, scale in the U.S., enter Europe and continue growing across Asia Pacific.

Threats

• Platform risk: AI assistants can change how they answer, cite and link at any time.

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

AI can simplify trip planning to a single conversation, but incomplete, outdated or conflicting information can mislead travelers and leave suitable hotels overlooked or misrepresented. Visaible continuously tests traveler questions, uses autonomous agents to correct information across hotel websites and marketing systems and verifies the results—giving travelers more accurate, current and relevant recommendations. For hotels, it makes their presence in this high-intent channel measurable and helps improve how they are recommended, creating opportunities for more direct bookings, stronger margins and less dependence on intermediaries charging 15%-25% commission.

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

Three channels currently drive customer acquisition.

• Data-led direct outreach: Visaible approaches hotel commercial and marketing leaders, often via LinkedIn. In the first meeting, it uses responses collected from AI assistants to show how the property appears, why competitors are recommended instead and how Visaible’s agents can improve its position.
• Land and expand: Prove visibility gains with a few properties, then expand across portfolios—Visaible’s most efficient growth channel, with one operator growing from three properties to 19 within months.
• Industry presence and thought leadership: Hotel research, media coverage and industry speaking engagements educate the market, build credibility and generate inbound demand.

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

We validated demand by measuring hotels’ AI visibility and accuracy before selling, uncovering widespread problems, winning customers—including major hotel groups—and generating strong interest at industry events. Visaible has since analyzed millions of AI responses across five markets, with one ten-week engagement lifting properties’ visibility from 4%-10% to 29%-47% and another operator expanding from three properties to 19. Our bottom-up estimate—hundreds of thousands of hotels paying a few hundred dollars monthly—represents a billion-dollar-plus software opportunity, excluding the larger potential in autonomous execution and agentic bookings.

How and when will you make money?

We already do. Visaible began generating revenue within weeks of launching and now has six-figure annual recurring revenue.

The business operates on a per-property monthly subscription across three tiers: $250 for monitoring, $350 for monitoring and optimization, and $500 for monitoring, optimization and autopilot execution. Contract value increases as hotel groups add more properties and adopt higher levels of automation, with larger accounts already worth tens of thousands of dollars annually.

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

Founder Sam Rich combines software engineering and high-growth operating experience with investment banking at Goldman Sachs and strategy at Bain & Company, equipping him to identify structural shifts and rigorously test commercial opportunities. He built and bootstrapped Visaible, generated revenue within weeks of launch and personally secured every early customer before raising capital, validating the opportunity through sales to senior hotel executives and measurable customer results.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Visaible’s team already brings together people from different countries, cultures and professional backgrounds. As the company grows, it will continue building a team that reflects the diverse global markets it serves.

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

The greatest challenge has been keeping pace with demand. Visaible has moved quickly from proving the need to working with major hotel groups across five markets, and customer demand has at times grown faster than the team’s capacity. The company is addressing this by expanding its team and using autonomous agents to scale onboarding, optimization and execution without compromising customer results.

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

Visaible is not relying on an untested market thesis. It already works with IHG properties and other major hotel groups across five markets, has delivered measurable visibility uplift for major hotels and has expanded successfully across customer portfolios.

Unlike many travel startups, Visaible does not need to acquire travelers. It sells to hotels with an immediate commercial incentive: AI-referred traffic is often direct, so one or two incremental direct bookings each month can cover the monthly cost of Visaible while helping hotels avoid intermediary commissions of 15%-25%.

Visaible is also purpose-built for hospitality in a market dominated by horizontal tools. Its autonomous agents do not simply identify AI visibility problems—they correct and verify them on autopilot for a few hundred dollars per property each month.

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

Visaible is planning on becoming the industry-standard operating system for hotel customer acquisition through AI—helping hotels control how they are discovered, recommended and booked across the world’s leading AI platforms.

What is your endgame?

Visaible’s endgame is simple: to help every hotel globally drive more direct bookings through AI.