This Swiss Startup Just Raised $1.9M to Fix AI's Flight Search Problem

Jan de Vries · 2026-08-11

Here's a number that might stop you in your tracks: for every single flight ticket actually sold today, the travel industry's systems have to process anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 searches. And that's not the worst of it. According to analysts at OAG, that number could balloon to a staggering 2 million searches per ticket by 2030 as AI agents become the norm. That's the core problem a young Swiss startup called Zerolook is trying to solve. The company, based in Zug, just closed a pre-seed funding round of $1.9 million (€1.6 million) to take on the hidden costs of AI-driven flight shopping. The round was led by London's Playfair, with backing from Vento Ventures, TrueSight Ventures, Alpha Venture, and a handful of angels from the tech, travel, and financial services worlds. ### The Broken Math of Modern Flight Search To understand why this matters, you have to look at how the travel industry's "look-to-book" ratio has shifted over the decades. It's a simple concept: how many times do people look at flights versus actually booking one? - **In the days of human travel agents:** roughly 1 search for every 50 bookings - **With online travel agencies (OTAs):** about 1 in 500 - **With metasearch engines like Kayak:** past 1 in 10,000 - **With AI travel agents and modern comparison tools:** beyond 1 in 200,000 Here's the kicker: every single one of those searches costs money to run. Airlines and travel agencies only get paid when someone books a ticket. But their technology providers charge them for every search query processed. When AI agents start firing off thousands of requests just to answer one simple question like "What's the cheapest Greek island to visit in June?", the costs spiral out of control fast. ### Meet the Team Behind Zerolook Zerolook was founded in 2025 by two heavy hitters from the travel tech world. Simone Lini, the CEO, previously ran partnerships for Google Travel, where he led Google Flights' OTA and metasearch efforts across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Before Google, he founded Waynaut, which got acquired by Lastminute.com, where he later became Chief Commercial and Product Officer. His co-founder, George Hadjiyiannis, brings the technical firepower. As former VP of Product at Kayak, he knows metasearch inside and out. His background also spans engineering and product leadership roles at Google, NVIDIA, and eBay. At Zerolook, he's the one architecting the prediction model and the partner API infrastructure. ### A Smarter Way to Answer Flight Searches So, what's the secret sauce? Instead of computing every single fare from scratch every time someone searches, Zerolook's API predicts flight itineraries and prices. It's trained on historical fare, schedule, and availability data, and it returns a predicted itinerary with a confidence score attached. The idea is to flip the economics. Right now, a huge chunk of search traffic is simply blocked because it's too expensive to answer. Zerolook wants to turn that blocked traffic into revenue-generating queries. As Hadjiyiannis puts it, there's no technical reason this has to hold the entire industry back. It's the result of legacy decisions made decades ago, some dating back to the era of the 8-track tape. ### What's Next for the Startup Zerolook says it's already signed letters of intent with a group of online travel partners ahead of its first pilots. The fresh capital will go toward launching Zerolook API v1 and building out a machine learning team in Zurich. It's a classic case of modernization without disruption. The company isn't asking the entire industry to overhaul its systems overnight. It's offering a bridge that lets airlines and travel agencies handle the AI-driven search volume that's coming whether they're ready or not. And with the numbers heading toward 2 million searches per ticket, being ready isn't optional anymore.