Ex-Meta engineers' Airial bets AI that reasons over trip logistics, not just itineraries

Airial is an AI travel-planning tool that builds multi-city trip plans covering flights, hotels, transport and daily itineraries.

A model that reasons over thousands of logistics variables, not an LLM alone, can plan a whole trip end to end like a family travel agent.

$3 million seed led by Montage Ventures with South Park Commons, Peak XV and individual investors from Meta, UiPath and Dropbox

Archit Karandikar, who held engineering roles at Meta, Google and Waymo, and Sanjeev Shenoy, who worked on Instagram Reels at Meta, are college friends from India. They said they have always had a passion for travel and wanted to build in the sector, describing Airial as working with your family's travel agent.

Karandikar says other companies in the space focus on a rough plan, while Airial's models reason over the logistics of flights, trains, connectivity time and the proximity of activities to a hotel by integrating dozens of APIs. He says its models draw on a DeepMind paper on AlphaGeometry, combining that inference method with LLMs. It has also recently added trip sharing, collaborative planning, cars and buses, and friends' trips.

Airial raised $3 million in seed funding and says it has tens of thousands of monthly visitors, focusing on growing users rather than revenue. It plans iOS and Android apps and verticalized search for hotels, activities and influencer videos. The article gives no revenue or retention figures.

Karandikar says most competitors produce a rough plan, while Airial reasons over the logistics in detail.

Montage's Daphne Che argued that a company using LLMs alone struggles with the many variables, which Airial's tech stack handles.

Personalization, such as only suggesting restaurants that suit a vegetarian, and time saved are the stated value for users.

Letting users import creator links and share trips adds a social layer to planning.

In a crowded field of AI planners, a startup can try to differentiate on the hard, detailed part of the job, but its claim is only proved when users book and return.

As of 2025-06-30 Airial has $3 million in seed funding and says it has tens of thousands of monthly visitors, with no revenue disclosed. Mobile apps and verticalized search were planned for the coming months. Its performance claims are the founders' own.