A travel company that uses AI software to help book package holidays has announced the closing of an oversubscribed Series A round of funding of £5.04 million (about $6.45 million).
Heartcore Capital led the round, with participation from Eka Ventures and Reinvestment Angels. Byway said the funds will be used to expand into new geographies and that the company also plans to hire more staff.
This includes engineers looking to develop their own AI-based software to act as a trip planner.
Currently, 60% of Byway is AI-based, with customers booking trips online through a trip design software called JourneyAI, while the remaining 40% is a human-based concierge service that allows staff to converse with potential customers.
How does Byway’s travel AI tool work?
The Byway planner uses information sources and context to create packages and recommend specific trips to users, including transport timetable and fare information, as well as details entered by the customer.
Speaking with TechCrunch, founder Cat Jones explained how the company’s AI takes into account information about popular trips in the past.
Unlike other travel tools, Byway focuses on non-flight travel. Jones explained how the funding will be used to perfect the AI around disruptions: “Right now, we’re manually classifying disruptions. But actually, especially with the funding, we’ll be able to automate a large part of the disruption detection and disruption replanning.”
“That way we can alert people and say, ‘Your journey is disrupted here, your train is a little late, you’re going to miss your connection, here’s the part we’ve fixed for you, and yes, of course you can tell us if you want, but really, if you’re happy with that, accept it and we can go.'”
The founders said they need to further refine the technology and hope the funding will also help make the AI more responsive.
“You can get this general model with certain regional nuances, but as we expand into more regions, we need the JourneyAI technology to have more regional nuances.
“But we’re kind of in a situation where we’re like, ‘Oh, I get it. I already know that I need this, and I need this, and I need this.’ And really, our biggest problem is that we don’t have many developers… So, we have a back-end roadmap for JourneyAI, but we don’t have enough back-end technologists to execute on that roadmap as quickly as we’d like. And the same goes for the front-end… So that’s why we need this funding.”
Featured Image: Photo by Josh Nezon on Unsplash
