YGO's €8M Raise: Making Travel Inventory AI-Bookable

Jan de Vries · 2026-10-21

YGO, a Berlin-based startup, just raised €8 million in a Series A round to make travel inventory bookable through AI agents. The round was led by Ventech, with participation from Sake Bosch, Caesar, and Business Angels. This follows a €2.5 million seed round in August 2024 led by GetAway Group. ### Why This Matters Online travel booking is undergoing a massive shift. Most of the industry's infrastructure wasn't built for AI, but YGO is changing that. Their platform connects travel companies directly with airlines, hotels, and tour operator inventory—without requiring them to rebuild their existing systems. Nicolas Barthalon, Partner at Ventech, put it this way: "Online travel booking is undergoing its biggest structural shift in decades but most of the industry's infrastructure was never built for it. YGO's customers are already re-owning their customer relationships with AI and putting real KPI uplifts on the board to prove it. That's why we believe YGO's neutral infrastructure will become critical to how travel operates in an AI-first world." ### How YGO Works Founded in 2023 by Julian Kögel, Sebastian Kreutzberger, and Willi Ibbeken, YGO sits at the intersection of legacy travel tech and the emerging ecosystem of AI agents. The platform structures and enriches fragmented hotel and product data, giving AI agents the depth and accuracy they need to reliably discover, compare, and recommend travel products. Here's what YGO offers: - **Content Enrichment:** Automatically generates verified, structured hotel data and delivers it across a company's own digital channels and to external AI assistants via MCP (Model Context Protocol). - **Hotel Q&A:** Embeds an AI-powered question-and-answer layer directly onto hotel pages, letting travelers ask any question and get verified answers in real time and in their own language. - **AI Distribution:** Makes a travel company's entire hotel portfolio accessible and bookable through AI agents like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. ### The Problem YGO Solves Online travel agencies and metasearch platforms have captured 15-25% of every booking, acting as intermediaries between travelers and suppliers. With AI assistants becoming the starting point for travel planning and booking, suppliers are looking for ways to reclaim direct relationships with their customers. YGO provides the infrastructure to do just that. The platform already processes bookings for major European travel players including Condor, Bentour, and GetAway Group. The results speak for themselves: a 90% reduction in manual operations and a 20% improvement in conversion for one airline client, and a 2.4x increase in average order value with no additional headcount for another. "Travel is one of the last major industries still built on infrastructure that was never designed for an AI-first world. We built YGO to change that: to give the travel industry the infrastructure to make its inventory accessible, bookable and ready for AI – whether through their own platforms or through external AI agents," said Kögel. YGO has grown its recurring ARR into seven figures within six months and has processed more than €15 million in bookings through its infrastructure to date. The fresh capital will be used to scale go-to-market and sales operations, deepen its AI orchestration platform, and expand beyond the DACH region, targeting both enterprise accounts and mid-sized travel companies. "This funding allows us to build on the strong business we already have with some of Europe's leading travel players and become the AI infrastructure layer connecting the industry to the next generation of travel," added Kögel. With AI assistants becoming the new front door to travel, YGO is positioning itself as the bridge between traditional travel suppliers and the AI-first future.