What the business is
AI trip-planning and booking assistant that turns chat prompts into itineraries with maps, availability and bookings for restaurants and activities
The bet
A chat-led AI travel agent with a rich consumer interface can take trip planning all the way through booking in one place
Starting capital
$7M seed from Costanoa Ventures
How it started
A group of 12 experienced founders saw a gap in trip planning and booking happening in one place with advice but no human agent. Co-founder Andy Moss said another co-founder remarked he missed having a travel agent, and the light bulb went on.
What happened
The team includes CEO Andy Moss (who built and sold Roadster, FabKids, PopSugar and ShopStyle), his Roadster co-founder Trey Matteson, and Garrick Toubassi, who led Gmail engineering at Google. A limited test dataset included the Hawaiian islands, where the AI planned a family-style trip in seconds. A public beta was due toward the end of 2023.
What has to be true
Travel planning had split across booking sites, Airbnb and social media
Travel was a popular topic on ChatGPT, suggesting demand for conversational planning
A consumer interface with maps, data cards and schedules goes beyond a text-only chat
The founders had prior consumer-product exits and Google AI engineering experience
What can be applied
Adding a purpose-built interface (maps, data cards, booking) around a language model was Mindtrip's bet against a plain chatbot answering travel questions.
Aftermath
As of 2023-09-07 Mindtrip had a working MVP with a limited dataset, $7M in seed funding and a public beta planned for the end of 2023. No user numbers were reported.
FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE
The sources
- Mindtrip wants to become your AI travel agent techcrunch.com