Zerolook, a startup that predicts flight prices, has raised $1.9 million in pre-seed funding.
The Switzerland-based company uses machine learning to predict prices and flight itineraries to help reduce the volume of hits on airline systems.
The investment was led by Playfair with participation of Vento Ventures, TrueSight Ventures, Alpha Ventures and a number of angel investors.
Recent figures from OAG revealed that up to 20,000 searches take place to generate one ticket sale, and that figure could rise to 200,000 as agentic artificial intelligence (AI) increases search volumes.
Zerolook said its model is trained on historical fare, schedule and availability data and presents users with a predicted itinerary and price as well as a confident score.
“Airlines and travel agencies only get paid when someone books, but their technology providers charge them to answer searches and can penalize excessive search volumes,” said Simone Lini, co-founder and CEO of Zerolook. “Most searches, however, are someone deciding, not someone booking.”
In an interview in the PhocusWire studio at Phocuswright Europe 2026, Lini said the startup plans to “compute prices in a different way” from the fare-filing process of the past six decades.
He added that by using historic data plus a sample of real-time data, results might not be “precise to the cent,” but they would be in an acceptable range.
He went on to discuss how the technology would enable partners to answer more queries in a timely manner, which would mean incremental revenue.
Lini also touched on the travel startup climate, the impact of AI and the potential for intermediaries to become middle-layer players.
See below for the full interview with PhocusWire’s Linda Fox.
Navigating AI developments as a travel startup