This Swiss Startup's AI Bet Could Slash Flight Search Costs for Airlines

Jan de Vries · 2026-08-11

Zerolook, a startup based in Zug, Switzerland, just landed a $1.9 million pre-seed round to fix a problem most travelers never see: the skyrocketing cost of answering flight searches. The company's business-to-business flight shopping API is designed to handle the massive search volumes that AI agents now generate, without breaking the bank for airlines and travel agencies. The funding round was led by London-based Playfair, with participation from Vento Ventures, TrueSight Ventures, Alpha Venture, and a group of angels from the technology, travel, and financial services sectors. It's a solid vote of confidence for a company tackling what insiders call the broken math of modern flight shopping. ### Why Flight Searches Are Costing Too Much Here's the core issue: airlines and travel agencies only get paid when someone actually books a ticket. But their technology providers charge them for every search query they answer. And when search volumes explode, those costs can spiral out of control. Simone Lini, CEO and co-founder of Zerolook, puts it plainly: "Most searches are someone deciding, not someone booking. Ask for the cheapest Greek island in June, and one question becomes thousands: every island, every date and every routing. Today, many of those searches cost more to answer than they are worth. Zerolook is changing that." The numbers tell the story. Look-to-book ratio—the number of searches compared to actual bookings—has gone from 1:50 in the era of human travel agents to 1:500 with online travel agencies. Metasearch pushed it past 1:10,000. Now, with AI travel agents and modern comparison tools, it's past 1:200,000. At that volume, computing every fare from scratch on a global distribution system or airline system simply stops paying for itself. ### The Team Behind the Fix Zerolook was founded in 2025 by Lini and George Hadjiyiannis, and they bring serious credentials. Lini previously served as Head of Partnerships for Google Travel, where he led Google Flights' OTA and metasearch partnerships across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He also built the Things to Do vertical from scratch. Before Google, he founded Waynaut, which was acquired by Lastminute.com, where he later became Chief Commercial and Product Officer. Hadjiyiannis, the CTO, was VP of product at Kayak, a leading flight metasearch platform. His engineering and product leadership background spans Google, NVIDIA, and eBay. At Zerolook, he architects the prediction model and partner API infrastructure. ### How Zerolook's API Works Instead of computing every possible itinerary and fare combination in real time, Zerolook's API predicts flight itineraries and prices. The model is trained on historical fare, schedule, and availability data, and it returns a predicted itinerary with a confidence score attached. This means traffic that's currently blocked—because it costs too much to answer—becomes traffic a seller can actually serve, unlocking additional revenue. The problem Zerolook is solving is massive. Pricing an itinerary between two airports means resolving billions of itinerary and fare-class combinations against rules that change frequently. Sellers pay for that computation whether or not anyone books. According to OAG's analysis, the number of searches per ticket sold rose from roughly 100–200 in the early 2000s to 10,000–20,000 today. By 2030, as AI agents scale, that could reach 2 million. Hadjiyiannis makes a compelling case: "There is no technical reason that this has to be a problem holding back the entire industry. It is the result of legacy decisions made decades ago; some dating from around the same time as the introduction of the 8-track tape. The infrastructure is long overdue for a modernization, and we plan to do exactly that, but without requiring an overnight change in how the entire industry operates." ### What's Next for Zerolook The company has already signed letters of intent with a group of online travel partners ahead of its first pilots. The new funding will support the launch of Zerolook API v1 and build out an ML team in Zurich. For an industry that's been held back by outdated infrastructure, this could be a significant step forward.