Where are they now? Checking in with the Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2024

PhocusWire has been checking in with our recent Hot 25 cohorts in the lead-up to the announcement of the class of 2027 on Nov. 9.

This week, we're looking back at the Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2024 and spotlighting their milestones over the past year.

Home-swapping network Kindred stands out thanks to its significant funding, landing $125 million to scale growth in February. The total included a $40 million Series B round and an $85 million Series C.

Corporate travel payments infrastructure provider Blockskye also made headlines when it partnered with Kayak for Business and FCM on an enterprise platform combining travel booking, payments and servicing for corporate travel. Acai Travel and Lumo was another noteworthy partnership, with Acai planning to integrate predictive disruption tech into its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered service platform.

Some of the 2024 cohort have also been acquired, including Legends, which was picked up by fellow Hot 25-er Fora in August 2025, and Weeva, which was acquired by Travalyst in September 2024.

We sat down with four of the 2024 startups—Deal Engine, Point.me, Unravel and Autoura—to discuss their latest initiatives, challenges and thoughts on AI.

Deal Engine

Deal Engine is an AI-powered platform that automates refund and change operations for airlines, online travel agencies (OTAs) and travel management companies.

2026 highlights

• Global footprint: Expanded our work with major airlines including Emirates, Qatar Airways and LATAM, while continuing to grow with leading travel companies such as Flight Centre.
• Enterprise scale: During major disruption events, Deal Engine has processed approximately 200K complex refunds in a single day, when airline servicing infrastructure was under its greatest pressure.
• From refunds to a servicing platform: Strengthened our core refund solution while expanding into ticket changes, compensation and real-time audit, giving airlines a single automation layer for servicing.

What is the biggest challenge your company is currently facing?

Travel servicing is extraordinarily complex. Every airline has different policies, systems and logic for handling edge cases, while financial decisions still need to be accurate and deterministic.

Our challenge is scaling automation across that complexity without sacrificing control. That complexity is also part of our moat: Deal Engine has been built specifically for travel.

Where is AI having the biggest impact on your business?

AI accelerates how quickly we build and deploy automation, but it does not replace the deterministic execution layer required for financial travel transactions. When an airline is deciding whether to refund $2,000, the answer cannot be “probably.”

Deal Engine handles airline-scale complexity by combining AI with deterministic decisioning, maintaining accuracy and control.

Point.me

Point.me is an award flight search and loyalty program.

2026 highlights

• 2026 is tracking to be a record revenue year for the business. And this year’s product rebuild is what drives it. Point.me rebuilt its consumer experience around one idea: Points are wealth almost nobody can see. My Points, a personalized loyalty wallet, connects a traveler's cards and loyalty accounts in real time and values each balance in flights they can actually book. Adoption among new subscribers rose 36% this year.
• Explore, launched in May, inverts award search. Instead of naming an origin, destination and dates, travelers open a world map showing everywhere their points already reach, across any region and date range. More than a third of new subscribers used it within seven days.
• Point.me launched Gateway, extending the same engine to enterprise. Banks, fintechs and loyalty programs can embed a complete award search and transfer experience inside their own apps, giving members the redemption tools Point.me built for consumers without building the infrastructure and partnerships themselves.

What is the biggest challenge your company is currently facing?

Confidence at the moment of award redemption. Travelers earn points intentionally, then stall when it's time to spend them: too many currencies, too many rules and no way to know whether they're making a good decision. That hesitation hurts everyone. Members disengage, and the programs that issued the points never see the loyalty they paid for. Our challenge is closing that gap at scale, on our own platform and inside our partners' apps, which means proving in the first 30 seconds that the value we're showing is real and the path to booking is genuinely doable.

Where is AI having the biggest impact on your business?

AI lets Point.me turn complex travel, loyalty, availability and pricing data into answers built around what a traveler personally holds: which trips are reachable on their balances, which transfer path is best given their currencies and whether they have enough for the flight in front of them. Those are judgment calls, and AI is what lets us make them at scale across 150+ airlines and 30+ loyalty programs. Combined with our proprietary technology and loyalty relationships, it produces more personalized experiences for travelers and sharper intelligence for the partners embedding redemption in their own apps.

Unravel

Unravel is an AI-powered shoppable video platform that lets banks, airlines and telecommunications companies sell travel.

2026 highlights

• Ranked No. 1 in travel tech and No. 12 overall on the Sifted 100 U.K. & Ireland 2026 leaderboard: independent validation of Unravel's leadership in agentic travel commerce.
• Our strongest year of growth: revenue 4x year over year, live brands 3x. Six H2 launches: Nexi (Pan-European financial services), Trust Bank Singapore, Tawuniya (KSA's largest insurer), 3 MEA banks (DIB, EIB, QIB), Etihad expansion. AMEX scaled to 14 countries. Every partner launched since Series A remains live and expanding scope.
• Two new propositions launched: Money Can't Buy Experiences, hand-curated premium athlete/celebrity-led experiences typically unavailable through standard booking channels, live with clients and drawing private-bank interest globally. And a fan-commerce vertical for sports clubs: match discovery, AI travel planning, hotels, exclusive experiences, ticketing. Conversations underway.
• Four senior additions to the team since Series A: Sinem Yucel (chief sales officer), Maarten van Pijpen (chief growth officer), Pieter de Haes (head of supply) and Oliver Chesterman (head of AI engineering).

What is the biggest challenge your company is currently facing?

Consumer AI is reshaping what customers expect from every embedded experience faster than client roadmaps. What seemed ambitious several years ago in the travel industry, an agentic travel assistant inside a banking app, is becoming the baseline expectation. That's a great problem to have because it not only makes our category critical for any enterprise looking to offer travel services but also enriches our product roadmap: shipping what's mature today and inventing what's mature next quarter. Staying ahead of that curve while the market catches up to us is where most of the energy (and fun) goes.

Where is AI having the biggest impact on your business?

AI is redefining the frontier of embedded travel commerce, and it's shaping our roadmap on every surface. Aide, our agentic travel assistant, turns search-and-book into converse-plan-book, converting five times higher than traditional booking journeys, now live across multiple partners. On the supply side, our AI intelligently pairs 3.5 million hotels with 200,000 pieces of influencer-shot destination content, so every recommendation feels curated rather than generic. The next frontier: voice-first agentic booking, personalization at the intent layer and cross-vertical travel triggers, where we're investing most in the second half of 2026.

Autoura

Autoura is an AI-powered digital experience platform for tours and activities.

Recent highlights

Our biggest change since being selected for 2024 is that we have launched PlanMyVisit.

 Where is AI having the biggest impact on your business?

I believe that AI can do four things:

• Be the end of humanity (bit out of scope for today's industry issues)
• Be a new funnel, e.g., companies like OTAs thinking about how they get their product in front of consumers
• Be about automation, e.g., how does my business be more efficient
• Be a new consumer product experience

It is this fourth zone that we sit in; we are a new consumer experience.

I believe consumers will:

• Start designing a day out (e.g., give me a five-hour food tour)
• Be personalized around their preferences
• Then, because this is family-sized groups—will be operated by autonomous vehicles (e.g., robotaxis and what comes after them)
• With AI glasses as the interface

PlanMyVisit is building that layer for attractions, e.g., you can chat to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok while you are going around an attraction, and it's all sorted out for you from our incorporated data—no hallucinations.