YGO has closed an €8M Series A round, with the venture firm Ventech in the lead. The Berlin startup builds detailed hotel data for travel companies, so their listings work on their own websites and inside AI chatbots.
Ventech, an early-stage investor founded in 1998 and active in Europe and Asia, was joined by the investor Sake Bosch, the venture firm Caesar Ventures and a group of business angels. YGO says the money will go into sales, its AI platform and growth beyond Germany, Austria and Switzerland, moving from large accounts to mid-sized travel companies too.
Nicolas Barthalon, a partner at Ventech, said online travel booking “is undergoing its biggest structural shift in decades”. In his view, much of the technology the industry runs on was not designed with that change in mind.
YGO says hotel information sits scattered across suppliers and systems, in forms AI tools struggle to read.
“Travel is one of the last major industries still built on infrastructure that was never designed for an AI-first world,” said Julian Kögel, YGO’s co-founder and chief executive.
Hotel Data Built For AI Assistants
YGO’s website calls the company “the data infrastructure behind travel AI”. Content Enrichment, the product the others are built on, fills each hotel listing with checked details on rooms, fees, policies and the surrounding area. It also writes descriptions in a seller’s own tone and languages, orders photo galleries and strips out duplicate images.
The company says it holds more than 5,000 verified attributes for each hotel, and the same hotel can be described differently for families, couples or business travellers. A second product, Hotel Q&A, lets guests ask about a hotel on a seller’s page and get an answer drawn from that data.
The third product, AI Distribution, aims to get hotels recommended by AI agents, the assistants that can carry out tasks for users, naming ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. AI assistants are moving into shopping, and OpenAI has been adding shopping tools to ChatGPT.
In its funding announcement, YGO says its system plugs into the older booking systems travel companies already run, and lets an AI agent plan and book a trip that strings together flights, hotels and activities. That way, it argues, suppliers can sell directly instead of giving online travel agencies and price comparison sites the 15% to 25% of each booking it says they usually keep.
Travel Firms Already Using It
YGO’s website lists Condor Holidays, Bentour Reisen, GetAway Group, Kurzurlaub.de and Peakwork among the tour operators and travel agencies that use it. Condor Holidays is a tour operator owned by the German airline Condor and Karlheinz Kögel, who founded the last-minute travel brand L’tur and is the father of YGO’s chief executive.
In testimonials on the site, Condor Holidays says it went live with YGO in three months. GetAway Group, a German specialist in themed short trips, says its international packages went live in four weeks, and it knows the startup well: it led YGO’s €2.5M round in 2024.
YGO also shares results from clients it does not name. It says one airline cut manual work by 90% and lifted its conversion rate, the share of visitors who go on to book, by 20%, while another client’s average order grew 2.4 times without extra staff.
The company adds that its recurring revenue, the income that comes back regularly from ongoing customer contracts, reached seven figures within six months. It also says it has processed more than €15M in bookings so far.
From Trip Planner To Hotel Data
YGO says it was founded in Berlin in 2023. It started out as YGO Trips, with a service for travellers themselves. People could pair a concert, festival or retreat with flights and a hotel, describe what they wanted in words or pictures, and let the AI build and book the trip.
Kurzurlaub.de, a German short-break booking site, later took on YGO Trips’ technology under a white-label deal, running it under its own brand. Alongside GetAway Group, the 2024 round drew in Felix Jahn, founder of the property broker McMakler, as well as Ralf Usbeck, Kiana Mardi of Lucy Capital and Expedite Ventures.
The founders of the long-distance bus company FlixBus, Jochen Engert, Daniel Krauss and André Schwämmlein, have also backed the startup, as have the founders of the holiday rental search site HomeToGo. YGO’s website now puts its total funding above €10M.
A Team With Travel Roots
Kögel runs YGO with fellow co-founders Sebastian Kreutzberger, the chief technology officer, and Willi Ibbeken, the chief operating officer. According to the funding announcement, the founders have grown travel businesses to hundreds of millions in revenue and have worked on AI products for more than a decade.
Usbeck, one of the 2024 angels, is now YGO’s chief commercial officer. He founded the travel technology companies TravelTainment and Peakwork, and built systems that connect tour operators, airlines and hotel suppliers.
YGO After The Round
YGO has closed its Series A with Ventech in the lead and plans to sell beyond German-speaking markets. Its customer results, revenue and booking figures all come from the company itself.
The startup began by planning trips for travellers. It now supplies the hotel data behind other companies’ sales, on their own websites and inside AI assistants.
