Where are they now? Checking in with the Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2023

Since we last checked in with our Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2023, several have landed funding, while others have changed hands.

Travel advisor platform Fora closed a $60 million Series D round in July at a $1 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to over $138 million. Airline revenue management tech company TravelX secured an “substantial” investment in August. In September 2025, Fetcherr also landed $42 million to expand its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered pricing technology.

Mount, an ancillary marketplace for short-term rentals, merged with adventure content company Popfly in February.

Also in February, Barcelona-based multimodal mobility booking platform Iomob was acquired by corporate employee transport platform Busup for an undisclosed amount.

We circled back with other members of our 2023 cohort, asking about their highlights from this year, their biggest challenges and where they’re seeing AI having the biggest impact.

Holibob

Holibob is an e-commerce engine for experiences.

2026 highlights

In June, we launched Holibob.it. A traveler types something like "a romantic weekend with something on the water," gets a shortlist from 500,000+ tours, activities and attractions, and books without leaving the conversation. It went live inside Google Things to Do the same month.

In September we released the Holibob SDK, free to download. A developer can have a working experience storefront running in sandbox in about three days, against roughly six months for a typical build, and the business can test all of it before anyone signs anything.

We rebuilt holibob.tech around a live demo, so a prospective partner can click through a working storefront rather than read about one.

What is the biggest challenge your company is currently facing?

Keeping up with where the booking starts. For years it started with a search box and a set of filters. Now more of it starts with a prompt to an AI assistant, and most travel brands built their experiences offer for the old route. Booking timing has shifted too: same-day bookings have dropped from around 60% in 2023 to roughly a fifth. The traveler who books at the hotel breakfast table is rarer than the industry assumes. We're building for both changes at once, and that means saying no to plenty of good ideas.

Where is AI is having the biggest impact on your business?

Mostly in how travelers find things to do. On Holibob.it, someone can describe the trip (two kids and a wet Tuesday in Edinburgh, say) and book from 500,000+ experiences in one conversation. It's also live inside Google Things to Do. Experiences suit this better than flights or hotels because nobody searches for "indoor activity, ages 6 to 9, under £60." They ask for a decent day out. Inside the business, we use AI to automate our own workflows and to make our catalogue readable by AI agents, since that's where we expect more bookings to begin.

Grapevine

Grapevine is an AI-powered platform for travel management companies (TMCs) that sends business travelers hotel and other suggestions after booking.

2026 highlights

• 2026 has been the first full year of Grapevine 2.0, rebuilt from the ground up as AI-native and multi-tenant. What began as personalized hotel nudges has evolved into an AI-powered communications layer for business travel, operating under the client's brand across email, SMS, WhatsApp, Teams and Slack.
• Grapevine also became fully conversational this year. Travelers can interact with the platform 24/7 to get support, ask questions about their trip or travel policy and book taxis and other ancillaries directly in chat, with ground transport fulfilled through its partnership with Jyrney. Both companies were named to The Business Travel Magazine Tech Hotlist 2026.
• Grapevine has now expanded beyond TMCs and is working directly with corporates, including several global organizations. The focus is on reducing off-program booking, improving traveler visibility and creating and capturing more complete travel data, giving travel teams the insights they need to influence program behavior and make better decisions.
• The company is preparing for its next stage of growth, with a growing pipeline across both TMCs and large corporates and discussions underway with investors around its next funding round. The focus for the next phase is scaling distribution, expanding corporate adoption and accelerating product development.

What is the biggest challenge your company is currently facing?

The biggest challenge is changing market perception around implementation. TMCs understand the value of increasing revenue per trip, but historical experience means many assume that implementing a new platform requires a lengthy integration and a place on next year's roadmap. Grapevine has focused heavily on removing that friction. With the right data access, the platform can be live in under two weeks and is designed to deliver meaningful incremental revenue without adding operational overhead. The challenge now is helping the market understand that the implementation reality is very different from the perception.

Where is AI having the biggest impact on your business?

AI is having the biggest impact on speed, both in how Grapevine builds and how clients interact with the platform. Internally, product ideas can be prototyped, tested against live booking data and put in front of clients in days rather than months. Externally, travelers can now talk directly to Grapevine to book and get support, while travel managers can interrogate their own data and receive insights immediately rather than waiting for static reports. The pace of iteration is the edge.

AltoVita

AltoVita provides enterprise software for companies booking extended stays and temporary housing for employees.

2026 highlights

• Integrated with a global hospitality wholesaler, adding 3M+ instantly-bookable stays and giving clients and employees comprehensive coverage and wholesale rates. This complements our strategy to integrate directly with property management ystems, reinforcing our leadership in extended stay connectivity, with 10M+ keys, from hotels to serviced apartments and alternative budget inventory.
• Won new business with several Fortune 500 clients, including the world's largest software company, as well as the largest TMC in the Middle East, validating our enterprise-grade platform against some of the toughest procurement processes in corporate travel and mobility.
• Successfully diversified our revenue, reducing reliance on any single market with our consolidated programs (business travel and global mobility) growing at 33% and emergency housing at 164%, while geographically we've built a global base spanning Europe (52%), APAC (21%), Americas (19%), Middle East (6%) and LATAM (2%).
• Sharpened our operational efficiency, driving scalable growth with productivity gains across core cost bases. Our annual revenue per full-time employee is up 37% year on year, and our clients are staying 40% more with us, reinforcing the strength of our platform and high-touch service model.
• Scaled our presence in APAC and opened our 8th global entity, incorporating in Australia to support the region's growing demand.

What is the biggest challenge your company is currently facing?

Our focus now is scaling the operational excellence that has been fundamental to AltoVita’s success. In the early years, we built the business with deep founder involvement, which helped establish the quality, judgement and client-centricity we are known for today.

As we scale, we are codifying that knowledge into stronger systems, processes and team capabilities, embedding the same standards across the organization. The opportunity is to evolve from founder-led excellence to institutionalized excellence, where quality and accountability scale independently with the business.

Where is AI having the biggest impact on your business?

The past year has transformed how we use AI. Internally, our engineering team is releasing features 45% faster than last year, while automation is enabling us to grow without scaling headcount at the same pace.

Externally, VITA AI is changing how clients discover and book accommodation. More importantly, AI is strengthening our business economics: our negotiated rates, contracted supply, purchasing power and proprietary data create a powerful flywheel, where better supply drives more transactions and richer data, making VITA AI smarter and adoption deeper. The result is a business that innovates faster, serves clients better and scales more efficiently.