Startup Stage: Altitude AI wants to modernize unmanaged business travel

Altitude AI

Altitude AI is building an AI-first business travel platform aimed at companies with unmanaged programs. The approach combines trip planning, booking and spend controls, giving employees an AI-powered travel assistant while helping to control costs.

Founded in 2025 by veterans of SiteMinder, the Australia-based company is currently operating in closed beta.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Altitude Al is an intelligent business travel platform that helps companies manage travel while lowering overall spend. Employees get a personal travel agent that helps them easily book entire trips from within their everyday tools. Finance teams get accurate cost controls and visibility into current and future spend.

Altitude Al turns business travel from something teams manage into something that manages itself.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Our proprietary Al stack analyzes both company and traveler behavior and a number of other data points, to plan and book trips proactively.

Give us your SWOT analysis of the company.

Strengths

• Proprietary Al model brings agentic infrastructure to all our features, beyond booking automation.
• Our agent is proactive, not reactive. It plans ahead and can suggest trip enhancements that align with a user's travel style.
• Strong early traction, with 90% of our users making repeat bookings.

Weaknesses

As an early-stage founding team we are still balancing fast-paced development with controlled growth.

Opportunities

Business travel is entering a new phase and there is a growing expectation for Al-driven, workflow-native experiences.

Threats

• Incumbents adding Al layers on top of legacy infrastructure risks creating a market perception that Al in travel is just an interface upgrade.
• Rapid changes in Al could disrupt our business model, though our infrastructure is designed to adapt.

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

Business travel is still painfully manual. Off-platform leakage is experienced by over 60% of companies that have implemented a tool to help manage their travel programs. In addition, over 65% of companies have unmanaged travel, with employees booking via leisure sites. 

These data points speak volumes about the approach and shortcomings of the platforms on the market today.

We focus on a high-quality experience, including customer support, and save companies on average 20% on their travel budget using proactive workflows and the intelligence built into our platform.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

We've helped teams across Australia plan and manage their business travel, from tech consultancies to growing startups. Our users are executive assistants, operations and sales leads, founders and finance teams who just want travel to be simple. They use Altitude Al to book, manage and track trips without needing a travel manager or external agency.

We're currently in a closed beta, keeping sign-ups limited while we refine the experience, but demand is already exceeding capacity.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

During our research and development process we spoke to hundreds of business travelers, plus finance and admin roles. From companies that already use a solution, to those with unmanaged travel, we gathered all the pros and cons and continue to talk to business travelers and companies frequently.

It's no secret that the business travel market is huge and growing faster than ever before, and the 65% of companies that have unmanaged travel programs represent a huge opportunity.

How and when will you make money?

We are already generating revenue through commissions and transparent, transaction-based pricing.

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

We have an incredibly strong founding team that met while working at travel tech success story SiteMinder, where they helped scale the company from its early days into one of hotel tech’s biggest players. They've led teams and driven product growth across multiple global SaaS and technology companies, specializing in distribution partnerships, product strategy and large-scale data systems.

Both founders have worked at the forefront of new technologies and have a shared frustration that travel is slow to lean into new tech when it could be leading.

In addition, both founders have lived the challenges firsthand as business travelers, and these practical insights, combined with their industry depth, are a mix that gives a unique perspective.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Our founding team is small but diverse. Our CEO and co-founder is an Australian female and our CTO and co-founder is an Australian-based male that hails from France. We both bring different cultural and professional perspectives. For us, diversity isn't just about who's on the team, it's about how the product is built. Altitude Al must be diverse as a product to ensure we can serve travelers of all backgrounds, roles and accessibility needs.

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

We are building something truly new in travel tech, and it can be easy to chase opportunities in every direction. Staying disciplined on solving one customer pain point at a time has been key.

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

Our strength lies in our proprietary technology that goes beyond search or booking interfaces. Unlike legacy tools that layer Al on top of outdated systems, our platform was designed for the Al era from day one. We are not a wrapper or a chatbot like many tools coming out.

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

A year from now, Altitude Al will be scaling and entering new markets. We will be the default choice for companies that want business travel to work for them, not become another task on the list.

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

Our mission is to build the world's most trusted agentic platform for business travel. We are 100% focused on long-term growth and becoming the system that powers modern travel programs.