I am pleased to announce Madrona is leading the first round of funding for Otto, a groundbreaking solution incubated in partnership with Madrona Venture Labs. Otto is your personal AI travel agent that seeks to be as valuable and insightful as a dedicated personal assistant. Otto offers enterprise-grade travel booking and servicing capabilities through an easy-to-use AI travel agent that autonomously plans, books, and manages your travel, even during your trip.
With the announcement of our investment in Direct Travel (a co-investor in Otto), I shared my thoughts on how we might collectively transform and modernize the corporate travel market – in pursuit of my desire to create The Perfect Trip. Otto focuses on delivering The Perfect Trip in an underserved market: unmanaged business travel.
Travel management companies (TMCs) such as Direct Travel, Global Business Travel, and BCD have built and deliver very effective managed travel programs that serve larger enterprise customers. But today, those companies and systems do not cost-effectively serve smaller companies and individuals in those companies. While the needs of smaller enterprises are different, the need to manage their travel spend and travel program is just as important. Otto changes the game by providing an AI-driven, executive assistant-like experience that manages travel with unparalleled ease and efficiency at a cost structure that is compelling for small businesses.
Otto leverages leading language models augmented with travel-specific models to enable a multi-modal service that allows you to book and manage your travel with simple voice or text prompts. Otto also leverages modern travel services such as Spotnana to provide the widest range of travel content to enable predictive and proactive servicing while you are on a trip. Whether it’s booking flights, changing hotel reservations, or managing travel policies, Otto’s conversational interface makes it as simple as speaking, typing, or texting a command. This allows individuals and small and medium-sized businesses to benefit from the same level of service that large enterprises enjoy at a manageable cost structure that can be up and running in a few minutes.
Otto is a self-learning AI that learns to anticipate your requests. Otto can uniquely integrate into your calendar and learn preferences from prior trips. Need to be in Chicago in 2 days for a meeting at 3 p.m. at the Aon Center? You also want to stay at a hotel within walking distance and would like to entertain your clients at a nice rooftop hotel bar. Simply state or type your request. Otto will book the flight, hotel accommodations, and dining reservation that best fit your requirements. You can also simply state, “Book my travel plans for next week.” Otto understands your travel preferences, requirements, pattern of behavior, and schedule requirements and will also book your travel logistics for you – within your preferences and cost parameters.
We know AI will be pervasive in the value it can deliver across the travel industry — from booking travel to predictive servicing that anticipates traveler needs based on real-time data to personalized recommendations based on past behaviors, which, of course, evolve with time. Otto’s AI capabilities are at the forefront of what’s possible. I couldn’t be more excited to partner with the incredible team at Madrona Venture Labs and Otto CEO Michael Gulmann to bring Otto to the market.
Not only does Otto leverage Spotnana (as you would expect), but in the coming quarters, Otto will leverage open platforms such as Direct Travel, Center, and Troop – other modern travel platforms Madrona is honored to partner with.
Madrona Venture Labs is led by Mike Fridgen, one of the founders of Farecast, which was one of the very earliest machine-learning-based travel services. The company predicted the best time to buy flights and was founded by Oren Etzioni, the first CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, and Hugh Crean. Crean, along with Eric Blachford, former CEO of Expedia, IAC Travel, and Couchsurfing, and Barney Harford, former CEO of Orbitz and COO of Uber, are all investing in this round as angels and will be valued advisers.
Michael Gulmann brings over 15 years of travel industry experience, including building Egencia’s corporate travel arm as chief product officer and SVP of marketing and driving the consumer experience of Expedia as the SVP/CPO of consumer products. My partner, Matt McIlwain, has also been an important supporter and contributor to Otto’s progress. We are incredibly excited about the value Otto can deliver to customers and look forward to bringing all the benefits of managed travel to the unmanaged corporate travel market.
This is just the beginning. At Madrona, we invest in and support the next generation of great companies, and Otto is a perfect example of the kind of transformative innovation that we are proud to stand behind. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for Otto and the incredible team behind it. Stay tuned and sign up for the Otto waitlist at OttoTheAgent.
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