2019.12.23
Eddy Travels closes pre-seed round led by Techstars to scale its AI travel assistant
Eddy Travels, an AI-powered travel assistant bot which can understand text and voice messages, has closed a pre-seed round of around $500,000 led by Techstars Toronto, Practica Capital and Open Circle Capital VC funds from Lithuania, with angel investors from the U.S., Canada, U.K.
Launched in November 2018, Eddy Travels claims to have more than 100,000 users worldwide.
Travelers can send voice and text messages to the Eddy Travels bot and get personalized suggestions for the best flights. Because of this ease of use, it now gets 40,000 flight searches per month — tiny compared to the major travels portals, but not bad for a bot that is available on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Rakuten Viber, Line and Slack chat apps.
Eddy Travels CEO and co-founder Edmundas Balčikonis says that “flights definitely have very competitive margins.”
“We want to expand into other products, make our accommodation search better, make our car rentals better, go into tours and activities, expand into travel insurance and other categories.”
“The idea is that in one conversation you'd be able, in two minutes, to get everything that you need for a trip by just sending a voice message or text.”
The team is now looking to expand into accommodation, car rentals and other travel services. Eddy Travels search is powered by partnerships with Skyscanner and Emirates Airline. Also, recently Eddy Travels signed partnership with Lithuania Travel and integrated AI-powered travel assistant into their website ---> https://lithuania.travel/en/
The founders are from Lithuania:
Edmundas Balcikonis, CEO, (previously founded and led as CEO TrackDuck startup, acquired by Invision),
Pranas Kiziela, CTO, (previously Senior Software Architect at Velocity, a machine learning adtech startup from LA, USA),
Adomas Baltagalvis, CMO, ( previously spent over $2mn on Facebook ads in the last few years, generating more than $30M in sales for clients).
The company HQ is in Toronto, Canada.
