Expedia Vet Leads Stealthy Madrona Venture Labs Spinout Building An Ai Agent For Business Travelers

A group of longtime travel industry veterans are teaming up on a new Seattle-based startup called Otto that is developing an AI-powered virtual assistant for business travel booking.

The company on Thursday announced a $6 million seed round led by Madrona.

Steve Singh, managing director at Madrona who co-founded business expense software giant Concur, is executive chairman of Otto.

The 7-person startup is led by CEO Michael Gulmann, who spent nearly a decade at Expedia Group in various leadership roles, and also worked at business travel management giant Egencia.

Otto is still developing its product, but Gulmann shared some details about the company’s vision in an interview with GeekWire this week.

The idea is to take advantage of large language models including OpenAI’s GPT-4 to help business travelers quickly book flights and hotels with a conversational chatbot that learns personal preferences and can filter through options based on a user’s calendar and other parameters.

The virtual assistant not only scours through lodging and airfare data but also can complete payments on behalf of the user. It’s built to be used both before and during a trip.

Otto is targeting business travelers who book their own travel and don’t pay for services provided by large corporate travel agencies, also known as Travel Management Companies (TMC).

“We can provide a ton of value to those travelers,” Gulmann said.

It’s the latest AI-booking tool using generative AI and other automation tools in an attempt to ease the logistics around travel booking. Earlier this year Expedia unveiled its own “AI-powered travel buddy” called Romie, and there’s a Germany startup called Swifty offering a booking tool for business travel.

Otto plans to offer its product for free and generate cash from a revenue-sharing model for facilitating bookings. Gulmann said there could be additional revenue opportunities down the line, such as charging users for advanced features.

He said Otto will likely use humans in the loop to verify transactions. The company’s bot is not able to access personal identifiable information or payment details, Gulmann said.

Otto was incubated at Seattle-based Madrona Venture Labs, the startup studio associated with Madrona, and spun out earlier this year.

Mike Fridgen, managing director of Madrona Venture Labs, spent time at two travel startups earlier in his career, including airfare prediction website Farecast, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008.

“With significant advancements in natural language understanding capabilities, robust travel API capabilities, and soaring consumer adoption of AI, Otto is poised to fundamentally alter the travel industry with an entirely novel experience,” Fridgen wrote in a blog post.

Hugh Crean, former CEO of Farecast, is an investor in Otto. Other backers include Erik Blachford, former CEO of Expedia, and Barney Harford, former CEO of Orbitz and a current board member at United Airlines.

Direct Travel, a corporate travel management company acquired by Madrona and others in April, also invested in the seed round.

Singh is also executive chairman at Direct Travel. Since departing Concur a few years after its $8.3 billion acquisition to SAP in 2014, Singh has also taken the exec chair role at Spotnana, a travel-as-a-service technology platform; at Center, a corporate card and expense management platform; and Troop, a group meetings and events company

Otto is partnering with Spotnana to provide its AI model with real-time airfare data, and plans to leverage open platforms from Direct Travel, Center, and Troop.

“We know AI will be pervasive in the value it can deliver across the travel industry — from booking travel to predictive servicing that anticipates traveler needs based on real-time data, to personalized recommendations based on past behaviors [which of course evolve with time],” Singh wrote in a blog post. “Otto’s AI capabilities are at the forefront of what’s possible.”