STARTUP STAGE: Una is an AI-powered digital travel agent

Una

XOKind is building AI agents that help people plan and make decisions more easily starting with its travel product, Una.

Una supports collaborative trip planning and uses artificial intelligence to recommend options that match travelers’ preferences.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Generational shifts in preferences and the COVID-19 pandemic have led consumers to plan their travel more spontaneously than ever before. This has created user demand and market share opportunities for novel ways of discovering, planning and booking travel that combat the fragmented and generic nature of the process today. 

XOKind built the Una travel app as a seamless, all-in-one place for people to plan their travel. Una supports collaborative trip planning and uses artificial intelligence to recommend options that match travelers’ preferences so they can hit the road quickly and be confident of a trip that is enjoyable for all.

Our long-term vision with Una is to build an AI travel agent and concierge that knows you well enough that it can plan and book entire trips for you with minimal back and forth while preserving a high degree of transparency and trust.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

XOKind’s core business and technology differentiation is an AI-enabled marketplace that matches users with the best available inventory to maximize their overall trip experience. The team at XOKind leverages the latest AI advances to build a knowledge graph of the world’s travel content, inventory of bookable as well as free travel places (parks, beaches, museums, etc.), and users’ preferences. 

Our main product is our mobile app called Una - which is a concierge and travel agent - an all-in-one place to plan your travel. We make commissions on the purchases made through Una. 

Unlike many other travel products, Una does not show ads. This is a way to build user trust and ensure that our incentives are always aligned with our users’.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Opportunities:

Threats:

• Ongoing uncertainty with international and business travel due to COVID-19. On the domestic front extreme weather events such as wildfires, floods and hurricanes have complicated travel plans. Una is well positioned to help users navigate this dynamic environment by helping users plan more spontaneous trips and in the future incorporate even more dynamic data sources. 
• Travel is admittedly a crowded space with many existing and new product offerings. There is also entrenched behavior and brand relationships even if they haven’t been delivering in a while. We set very high standards with Una’s product experience and work hard to gain our users’ trust as outlined above. 

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

• Finding travel options that match customers’ (own or group) interests is a laborious and time-consuming process today which limits how frequently they travel
• Often, online travel content is not very actionable - you see a beautiful destination on social media, but taking a trip around it is nowhere close to a one click book experience
• Online booking is often opaque - advertorial placements guiding where you should travel, influencing hotel rankings, or creating a false sense of urgency/scarcity - hard to find authentic and objective points of view
• Options available to customers are not spot-on with respect to their personalities, interests and budget limitations
• Tools used for collaborating on travel plans today such as notes and spreadsheets are not designed for travel. Trip and place details such as opening hours and reviews are not dynamically updated but instead get stale after the copy/paste. Figuring out proximity to landmarks or driving times requires a lot of back and forth with maps apps. Travel guide apps typically exclude the booking functionality.

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

We have been in public beta since mid-Feb’21 and have seen strong user growth and retention since then.

Collaboration is a powerful feature in driving organic customer growth. We are partnering with travel influencers who we love to create delightful itineraries and travel content. Over time, we could become an actionable counterpart to platforms like Instagram and help them monetize their great content via rev share.

Users can dream up their next trip by viewing our Explore feed, which features fresh itineraries added daily relevant for a range of traveler personas. This engaging trip feed is inspired by top travel sources, in-the-know influencers, our user base, as well as original trips from our travel partner writers.

We can use organic and targeted/paid social media content via platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

We have been featured on the iOS App Store as a “Hot this week” app. We have also been featured in a parent blog, and national (CNBC), print and TV outlets as a top travel app. 

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

From prototyping to alpha to beta, our team has conducted extensive research among our target personas using a design sprint methodology to build a product that users find useful and delightful. It’s through this process that we discovered the need for a travel app that solves spontaneous and collaborative trip planning.

Una product and technology development is very user-centered. We believe this has contributed to a loyal fan base of Una users who have been sharing Una trips with friends and family.

Travel is obviously a very large market. By some estimates millennials alone spent $200 billion on travel in 2018. Hotels, vacation rentals and airlines have a market size of $1.5 trillion. By 2025, 75% of all travelers will be millennials and GenZs. As mentioned above, they are creating unique product demands and will change the market landscape.  

How and when will you make money?

We make revenue through commissions from bookings made in the app. We recently introduced hotel bookings in the app and will soon include vacation rental bookings. We have partners already signed up to provide the ability to purchase flights, car rentals, activities, tours and attractions, and will be progressively bringing these into Una.

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

Founding team: Arjun Bansal (CEO; PhD Neuroscience); Yinyin Liu (CTO; PhD Machine Learning); Sarah Harris (VP Product; PhD Media Studies, MBA)

Prior to co-founding XOKind, Arjun (Fortune 40 Under 40, 2019) was a co-founder of the AI startup Nervana Systems (acquired by Intel in 2016). Later he served as a VP in the Intel AI group, where together with longtime colleague Yinyin (ex-head of data science, Intel AI; re.work top 30 women in AI) learned about the challenges faced by companies trying to incorporate AI into everyday product experiences. They teamed up with Sarah (ex. product manager at Apple iOS/Siri) to package the latest AI advances into delightful consumer experiences, and Una is the fruition of that vision. 

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Diversity and inclusion has been part of the founding DNA of XOKind. We made a conscious effort to have both technical as well as design thinking from the get-go. Two out of the three founders are women, and two out of three of us are foreign born, naturalized Americans. We have lived in and traveled to many parts of the world. 

Yinyin has been an advocate of explainable and transparent AI, and initiated efforts in AI research / AI technology for social good, and cross-organizational effort to use AI technology to improve lives and society. 

At XOKind we strive to create a kinder, more human world – and our name and product reflects that. XOKind is an AI company, but it has kindness firmly at its heart.

While Una offers a broad set of trips for many user personas, we tried to keep busy moms/parents/professionals in mind when designing features. Women form the majority of the Una user community.

We believe AI agents can drive the next wave of enhancements in quality of life by automating tedious jobs, improving the user’s experience while always being on the user’s side. We hope that this trend will benefit people that might have traditionally faced barriers to traveling due to lack of time available for planning or access to travel planning and booking assistance. Our prices are also very competitive as we are passing on a lot of our savings back to our users.

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

As you might imagine, COVID-19 played a huge role in creating a travel product in 2020. Just a few months before COVID-19 hit, we had set up an office in San Diego and had folks join us from all across the country and from Canada.

As soon as we were in lockdown and WFH mode, we had to rapidly adapt to new ways of collaborating and working together, while managing kids at home with disrupted school schedules. We also had to pivot last summer from initially targeting more of a SMB market (which vanished into zoom calls overnight) to focusing more on spontaneous, local, outdoor, leisure trips to best serve the changing needs of travelers.

Through it all, we are proud to have built a team and culture that’s loaded with grit and passion about our shared vision.

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

We have spoken to several past travel startup founders, and we are very grateful for the learnings that they’ve shared. We have tried to incorporate these learnings as part of our product and business strategy when it comes to creating key magical moments in the app, lowering CAC, increasing LTV, addressing the low frequency challenge in travel head on and using technology to scale efficiently and solve problems.

We are committed to building superior products and services that seamlessly allow people to plan and book travel. We are already seeing a path to millions of dollars in bookings based on our current usage and combined with our future plans and user growth we are very optimistic!

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

Una will include transportation (flights, car rentals, RVs) planning and bookings options, and improved international support as the world emerges from COVID-19. We will continue to grow our user base and revenue. Users will trust our brand for their travel recommendations, planning and booking

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

XOKind has a long-term vision of bringing AI enhanced consumer experiences not just to travel via Una, but to other verticals as well. We plan to follow a strategy that gives us flexibility in achieving that goal, whether it’s through going public or staying private.