Growing up in Pakistan, Saad Saeed dreamt of fast cars and soccer, and it was those two things that brought him to Berlin to study.
Germany’s Autobahn fascinated him. “It’s crazy,” he says. “Out of all the countries, the one with no speed limit has to be Germany—with all the rules.”
Fifteen years later, Saeed is still chasing speed, only now the race is in travel technology.
As the founder of travel discovery site, Layla.ai, he is trying to crack one of the most stubborn problems in the industry: travel planning. It’s a space so littered with failed attempts that investors have given it a nickname: the graveyard.
Yet, he’s walked into it knowingly, starting Layla.ai in 2023 with co-founder Jeremy Jauncey, CEO of Beautiful Destinations.
A founder who didn’t start in travel
Before Layla, Saeed had already lived the startup rollercoaster. He was part of the founding team behind Flink, the instant grocery delivery company that rode the Covid-era boom in on-demand services. What began as a response to lockdown demand quickly became one of Europe’s fastest-growing startups.
Within a year, the company had grown to around 10,000 staff across four countries—riders, warehouse pickers, engineers and operational teams all racing to deliver groceries faster than customers could fetch them themselves.
It was growth at breakneck speed, but scale also brought perspective. “I realized groceries is definitely not my industry,” Saeed says with a laugh.
His instincts had always gravitated toward businesses where data and technology sat at the center of the product, not logistics and operations. Earlier in his career, he had worked in financial services building systems that predicted whether borrowers would repay loans—a space where algorithms and data modelling determined outcomes.
That was the kind of problem he loved solving.
So after leaving Flink in 2022, he began traveling and discovered a problem facing travelers like himself.
The 10-tab problem
“It felt strangely primitive,” he says. “I had to open multiple browser tabs—flights, hotels, travel blogs, YouTube videos, Instagram posts—and slowly piece together an itinerary.”
Ten tabs often turned into 20. Even stranger was the fact that travel platforms he had used for years seemed to know almost nothing about him.
“Spotify knows what music I want to hear. Netflix knows what shows I want to watch,” he says. “But in travel, even after decades of using these platforms, they still didn’t know me.”
The contrast felt glaring. In almost every other consumer category, personalization had already transformed the experience. Travel, by comparison, remained largely transactional.
“In travel, it was always, okay you go on yourself and try to figure everything out, so that is what drew me into this industry.”
For a builder like Saeed, it felt like a system waiting to be rebuilt.
The graveyard warning
When Saeed shared his idea with his previous investors, the reaction was immediate. “Whatever you do, don’t build a trip planning startup,” they told him.
Over the past two decades, countless companies had tried to build tools that could plan entire trips—and most had failed.
The biggest challenge was monetization: how to convert planning activity into bookings. Then there’s the fact that actually, many travelers enjoyed the act of researching their trips themselves, with some research showing the joy of planning is often more than going on the trip itself.
But Saeed interpreted the graveyard differently. “If many people have tried to solve a problem and failed, it doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real,” he says. “It might just mean the timing wasn’t right.”
To him, the underlying frustration travelers felt when planning trips had never disappeared. The tools simply hadn’t caught up yet.
Despite investors’ initial skepticism, Layla brought in a €3 million investment from travel industry leaders, which include co-founders of Booking.com and Skyscanner, Andy Phillips and Barry Smith, respectively, along with entertainment star and entrepreneur Paris Hilton. The funding round was led by Firstminute Capital and M13.
And this March, it announced a strategic seven-figure investment round from global investors including United Airlines Ventures, Baidu Capital, and INCE Capital, alongside existing investors M13, Firstminute Capital, and SparkLabs.
The funding will expand Layla’s identity-first infrastructure to further deepen conversational planning globally.
Why now?
Three shifts convinced Saeed that travel planning might finally be solvable.
The first was data availability. During the pandemic, much of the travel industry digitized rapidly. Hotels, tours and attractions that once lived offline rushed to integrate with online distribution systems. Inventory became structured data that machines could analyze.
“All the hotels came online. Activities came online. Flights were already there,” he says. “The data was suddenly there.”
The second shift was the migration of travel inspiration to social media. Where travelers once relied on blogs and guidebooks, they now discovered destinations through short vertical videos— Instagram reels, TikTok clips and travel creators whose videos could rack up millions of views.
The gap between inspiration and booking was part of Layla’s founding thesis. “We actually started Layla before the whole LLM revolution came because we had a very strong thesis that personalization has to be next in travel.”
Saeed noticed something interesting in those videos’ comment sections on sites like Beautiful Destinations. Viewers constantly asked the same questions. Where is this? How do I go there? How much does it cost? Creators rarely had time to answer.
Today the Layla platform integrates content from more than 2,000 travel creators, combining visual discovery with booking capabilities. Not all the creators are from Beautiful Destinations, he says. “We have direct relationships with a lot of them.”
The third shift was technological—artificial intelligence. Travel planning is one of the most complex consumer decisions people make. According to Saeed, planning a single trip can involve thousands of variables—flights, hotel locations, weather patterns, activity schedules, visa requirements, budgets and personal preferences.
“Per trip there are around 2,000 data points involved,” he says.
Until recently, technology simply couldn’t process all those variables simultaneously. Now, with advances in AI, it finally can.
A new travel interface
Saeed doesn’t believe travel planning will be replaced by a single interface. Instead, he sees three experiences merging into one.
The first is visual discovery. When travelers are deciding between destinations—say Albania or Slovenia—images and short-form video are far more powerful than text. Layla therefore leans heavily on creator content to spark ideas.
The second interface is conversation. Once travelers have a rough direction, they begin describing what they want in more detail. And interestingly, Saeed says many users start by describing themselves. “We find people are sharing more about themselves because they know that AI works better when given context.”
The third interface is search and filters, which still play a role when travelers want to compare concrete options—flights, hotel prices and schedules.
What Layla wants to do is stitch those three interfaces together that help take a traveler to booking, whether direct with agents or suppliers or through OTAs.
Why humans still matter
And this is where the human element comes in. Saeed does not believe humans will disappear from the booking process, even with agentic AI, especially for more complex, multi-city trips. “I don’t think that people will tell an AI agent to book a multi-day safari tonight and tomorrow, I’ll pay for it.”
In fact, Layla has incorporated human travel advisors into its model. When travelers plan complex trips—honeymoons, safaris or multi-country family itineraries—many still want reassurance before committing thousands of dollars.
Recently, Layla facilitated a $26,000 safari booking that moved from inspiration to booking in less than two days. AI generated the itinerary. A human advisor confirmed the details and finalized the booking.
For travel agents, the model has produced surprising results. Before working with Layla, many agents spent hours preparing trip proposals for potential clients who never booked. Conversion rates could be as low as 5%.
Now AI filters early inquiries and hands agents travelers who are already serious. “The human agents we work with are getting five times more leads,” Saeed says.
The race to become travel’s front door
Layla is far from alone in pursuing this vision of becoming travel’s new front door—in fact, the graveyard may soon become a red ocean.
Major travel companies are racing to build AI planning tools. Platforms like Airbnb, Booking.com, Skyscanner and Expedia have launched conversational travel interfaces.
“For years, these companies depended heavily on traffic from Google. Now the battle is shifting to something more strategic. Who owns the traveler relationship?” he says.
Then there are lots of new startups which, like Layla, are determined to crack the code, if the timing is finally right.
“The race has definitely started,” he says, with a smile.
Early signs of demand and expansion plans
In March, Layla announced that it has processed over $1 billion in planned trip value across 30 million travel messages—with 40% of users skipping traditional destination searches.
As for monetization, Saeed says its early traction with subscribers suggests that travelers are willing to pay for a different model. The company has attracted around 30,000 paying subscribers, each paying about €50 a year.
Interestingly, its most engaged users are not Gen Z. They are travelers aged 40 to 60 planning complex itineraries—honeymoons, safaris, multi-stop European road trips or family adventures.
The bulk of Layla’s subscribers are now from Europe and the U.S., and Saeed is now looking towards Asia, cognizant of the fact that Asian travelers have already embraced the fusion of social content and commerce in ways Western markets are only beginning to explore.
Layla’s investor base reflects this global ambition, including backing from Chinese tech giant Baidu and travel-focused venture investors.
For Saeed, Asia offers both a growth market and a learning opportunity. “In Asia, content and booking have been connected much more closely,” he says.
A different kind of travel future
If Layla’s thesis proves correct, the biggest shift may not simply be easier planning. Saeed believes it will be more travel—and more diverse travel.
It stands to reason that when planning becomes easier, travelers may venture beyond the obvious destinations. Barcelona may lead them to smaller Spanish towns. A safari might become easier to organize. Multi-city trips might feel less intimidating.
“I think people will travel more,” Saeed says. “And they’ll travel to places they never expected before and do things they never expected to before.”
For now, though, Layla remains an ambitious upstart—a startup attempting to solve a problem that has defeated many before it.
But Saeed is comfortable with that. After all, he was drawn to Germany for the thrill of speed. And in the race to become travel’s new front door and to owning the traveler relationship, it’s only just begun.
This story originally appeared on WiT.