Startup Stage: BizTrip AI wants to replace fragmented booking systems for business travelers

BizTrip AI

BizTrip AI, a PhocusWire Hot 25 Travel Startup for 2026, provides an artificial intelligence (AI) powered personal travel assistant for business travelers.

Last month, the startup raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding, bringing its total funding amount to $2.5 million.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

BizTrip AI is an AI-powered business travel intelligence platform that helps corporate travelers plan, book, manage and optimize business travel by replacing fragmented tools and human review loops with a single AI layer that continuously understands company travel rules and real traveler preferences, alongside real-time market conditions.

Instead of enforcing static policy and processing exceptions after the fact, BizTrip AI dynamically recommends compliant options that travelers actually choose—reducing exceptions, improving adoption and delivering savings that show up in real bookings, not just policy documents.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Business

At BizTrip AI, we are rebuilding the way business travel is booked for the first time in more than three decades. Our agentic AI is designed to fundamentally simplify corporate travel by replacing search-heavy online booking tools with a conversational, intelligent assistant that works the way people actually think and plan.

Instead of forcing travelers and travel arrangers to sift through hundreds of flights and hotels, BizTrip AI allows them to simply ask. The AI understands each traveler’s preferences, role and trip context and delivers a short list of highly relevant air, lodging and car options that are automatically compliant with company travel policies.

By removing friction from the booking process, BizTrip AI makes life meaningfully easier for frequent travelers and those who support them, unlocking significant productivity gains across the workforce. At the same time, better decisions, higher policy compliance and smarter recommendations drive measurable cost savings and improved margins for corporation.

BizTrip AI isn’t an incremental improvement to the existing model, it’s a rethinking of how business travel should work in an AI-first world.

Technology 

At the core of BizTrip AI is an AI decision engine that combines:

• Company travel policies
• Individual traveler preferences and behavior
• Real-time pricing and availability data
• Historical booking and personal traveler preferences
• Multi-platform traveler workflow integration

The system uses machine learning models to recommend optimal itineraries, maintain policy compliance, automate approvals and surface cost-saving opportunities. Over time, the platform becomes more intelligent and personalized to the traveler experience.

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

Strengths

• AI-native product built specifically for business travel use cases
• Clear ROI for employers (cost savings, compliance, productivity)
• Strong alignment between traveler satisfaction and company goals
• Scalable SaaS economics with recurring revenue

Weaknesses

• Brand awareness in a crowded travel technology ecosystem
• Dependence on third-party travel inventory and data sources
• Longer enterprise sales cycles as customers integrate travel workflows

Opportunities

• Massive shift toward distributed and hybrid workforces
• Strong demand for AI technology throughout all industries and teams
• The corporate travel industry is built on legacy tech stacks, lags advances in AI technology and is ripe for disruption
• Expansion into expense management, sustainability tracking and duty-of-care

Threats

• Large incumbents extending AI features into legacy platforms (but this is limited given both “the innovators dilemma” and the fact that legacy core tech stacks are fundamentally different than AI native approaches—it turns out they it’s really hard to sprinkle AI on tech that was created before the iPhone)
• Volatility in travel demand due to macroeconomic or geopolitical events
• Margin pressure from supplier negotiations

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

From the customer perspective:

• Travelers are spending excessive time booking and rebooking trips.
• Confusing or ignored travel policies
• Manual approvals and expense reconciliation
• Visibility into dynamic supplier pricing and negotiated fares and rates
• Traveler frustration with outdated booking tools that drive off-channel bookings, causing companies to miss negotiated rates and lose visibility into employee trips

From the industry perspective:

• Inefficient distribution of inventory
• Low policy compliance rates
• High servicing costs for travel management companies
• Lack of actionable data for employers
• BizTrip.AI reduces friction for travelers while creating structure, insight and cost control for employers.

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

Our go-to-market strategy is primarily “direct to enterprise” with a focus on speed to value. We are exploring strategic partnerships as well with partners who want to leverage our tech for their customer base and as a channel to their clients.

1. Bottom-up adoption through onboarding corporate clients with large travel programs
2. Optimize performance by delivering greater travel spend optimization, strong policy compliance and traveler convenience
3. Begin building case study-driven adoption
4. Leverage established partnerships with Sabre, Cerebri AI and Cain Travel
5. Explore partnerships with expense management, HRM, finance and payroll platforms

We emphasize fast customer implementations and strong traveler adoption in demonstrating measurable savings within the first 30-60 days.

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 through:

• Interviews with finance leaders, travel managers and frequent business travelers
• Analysis of existing travel workflows and expense data
• Early adopters who replaced or augmented legacy travel tools
• Clear willingness-to-pay signals based on cost savings and time reduction
• The global business travel market exceeds $1.7 trillion annually, with software and services representing a rapidly growing subsegment. Our initial addressable market with enterprise organizations in North America alone represents a multibillion-dollar opportunity.

How and when will you make money?

BizTrip.AI generates revenue through:

• Subscription fees per company and per active traveler
• Premium AI insights and analytics modules

We are already monetizing early customers, with a clear path to profitability driven by SaaS margins and low incremental servicing costs.

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

BizTrip.AI was co-founded by CEO Tom Romary, a travel industry entrepreneur and the former co-founder of Yapta (acquired by Coupa in 2020); CTO and agentic AI innovator Scott Persinger; and AI pioneer and investor Andrew Ng.

Romary founded BizTrip in 2024 on a mission to transform business travel through machine learning and AI. Prior to BizTrip, Tom was founder and CEO of Yapta. Romary was VP of marketing at Alaska Airlines and prior to that was VP of marketing at Fogdog Sports, VP of product management at Real Networks and a product manager at Electronic Arts. Romary has a mechanical engineering degree from Duke University, and an MBA from Harvard University.

Persinger co-founded BizTrip along with Romary and leads all software development and technology at BizTrip. Before BizTrip, Persinger was founder and CEO of SuperCog, an AI developer tools company. Prior to that, Persinger served as SVP of engineering at Tatari, where he scaled the engineering organization and led the development of advanced analytics and ML infrastructure for digital TV ad optimization. He was previously a principal at Stripe, where he launched and grew the alternative payments team globally. Persinger holds a Bachelor’s degree in computer cience from the University of California, Berkeley.

BizTrip AI is also steered by AI Fund-appointed board member, Rob Solomon, an innovator and pioneer in travel technology and marketplace businesses over the past 25 years. He has served as chairman and CEO of GoFundMe, president and COO of Groupon and CEO of Sidestep, which merged with Kayak. The company has also assembled a network of travel industry and technology advisors that includes Mike Daly,  Eric Bailey, Valerie Layman, Dave Falter, Andy McGraw, Tom Kippola and Christopher Zando.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Diversity and inclusion are built into BizTrip’s culture and hiring philosophy from day one. We:

• Recruit from diverse talent pools
• Build flexible, remote-friendly work structures
• Design products that support accessibility and global users
• Foster an inclusive environment where diverse perspectives influence product decisions

We view diversity as a competitive advantage, not a checkbox.

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

Many things that go into starting a business are not easy—but securing funding while simultaneously getting the technology built was particularly challenging. We got it done.

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

BizTrip AI is uniquely positioned to succeed in this new reality as its technology sits at the intersection of AI innovation and deep travel expertise. This powerful combination leads to agentic technology that’s able to make smarter business travel decisions, streamline operations and deliver measurable cost savings—exactly what modern enterprises need to thrive in today’s tech-driven travel environment.

It represents an opportunity for TMCs, OBTs and others that plan, book and manage travel to achieve more in the absence of having a large team. The industry is evolving quickly and is instituting new technology to become less dependent on live agents. There’s significant value delivered to corporations by saving time, reducing “high-touch” work and delivering consistent price monitoring and re-shopping.

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

In 12 months, we expect to have:

• A strong base of paying corporate customers
• Proven unit economics and retention
• Expanded AI capabilities driven by real usage data
• Strategic partnerships accelerating distribution

BizTrip.AI will be recognized as a credible, category-defining player in intelligent business travel.

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

Our primary goal is to build a durable, independent company that redefines the future of business travel booking and management. We are open to acquisition by a strategic player if it meaningfully accelerates that vision, but our roadmap supports long-term growth—whether that ultimately leads to remaining private, a strategic exit or a public offering.