YGO secures €8M to scale its AI-powered travel infrastructure
Tech.eu Tamara Djurickovic
YGO just raised €8M to plug AI search and booking into travel companies. The bet: airlines and hotels can skip more middlemen and keep more of each sale.
Based on reporting by Tech.eu, Tamara Djurickovic — read the original for the full story.
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YGO has raised €8 million in a Series A led by Ventech, with Sake Bosch, Caesar Capital and business angels also in the round. The startup is building AI infrastructure for travel companies that want search, recommendations, customer service and booking features without ripping out their current systems.
The pitch is pretty specific. YGO sits between travel suppliers and both the old booking channels and newer AI assistants, then structures messy hotel and travel inventory so AI systems can actually work with it. That means personalised recommendations, semantic search and automated booking across flights, accommodation and activities.
For YGO, this is also a shot at the middlemen. The company says online travel agencies and metasearch platforms typically take 15% to 25% of each booking. Its argument is that direct AI-powered booking channels can help suppliers keep more control over customer relationships and improve margins.
The startup already processes bookings for Condor, Bentour and GetAway Group in Europe. YGO says one airline customer cut manual operations by 90% and lifted conversion by 20%, while another saw average order value rise 2.4 times without hiring more people. Ralf Usbeck, who founded TravelTainment and Peakwork, has also joined the team.
The new money is earmarked for sales, go-to-market work, product development and expansion beyond the DACH region. YGO says it wants both enterprise customers and mid-sized travel companies, which is a sensible target if the industry really is as stitched together with legacy plumbing as it sounds.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Travel is a perfect place for this kind of infrastructure play because the old stack was built for browsers, not agents. The real question isn’t whether AI can help here; it’s whether suppliers finally get tired of paying tolls to everyone in the middle. Middlemen have had a lovely run, but rent-seeking looks even worse when software can route around it.
Read more about this at: Tech.eu
