Pomegra
Berlin's YGO closed an €8M Series A led by Ventech to make airline, hotel and tour-operator inventory bookable by AI agents, with expansion beyond DACH next.
Key Takeaways
- YGO raised an €8M Series A led by Ventech, with Sake Bosch, Caesar Capital and business angels also in.
- The 2023-founded startup reports seven-figure ARR, about 10 customers and over €15M in processed bookings.
- Valuation was not disclosed. The money goes to sales, product and expansion outside the DACH region.
Lead
YGO, a Berlin startup that connects travel companies' booking systems to AI agents, announced an €8M Series A on October 21, 2026. Ventech led the round. Sake Bosch, Caesar Capital and several business angels also participated. The company did not disclose a valuation.
Founded in 2023 by Julian Kögel (CEO), Willi Ibbeken and Sebastian Kreutzberger, YGO sells infrastructure rather than a consumer app. Its software sits between suppliers such as airlines, hotels and tour operators and the chat-style assistants that travellers increasingly use to plan trips.
What Does YGO Actually Sell?
YGO sells a data and integration layer that lets travel companies expose their inventory to AI agents without rebuilding their booking stack. The platform structures and enriches fragmented product data, with more than 5,000 verified facts per hotel listing, so agents can find, compare and recommend offers reliably.
Customers can use it for semantic search, personalised recommendations and automated customer service. They can also take bookings on their own platforms or through external AI assistants. It displaces the manual data-cleaning and bespoke integration work that tour operators and online travel agencies have handled in-house or through intermediaries.
How Is the Company Performing?
YGO reports seven-figure annual recurring revenue, reached within six months of commercial launch. It counts roughly 10 customers, among them Condor and Bentour, and says it has processed more than €15M in bookings. The company employs about 20 people across Europe, the US and Africa.
It also cites customer-level results. One airline customer reported a 90% cut in manual operations and a 20% rise in conversion rates. Another saw average order value rise 2.4x. These are the company's own figures, drawn from a small customer base, and have not been independently verified.
Who Backed YGO Before This Round?
YGO's earlier backers include GetAway Group, which led a €2.5M seed round in August 2024. Participants included HomeToGo co-founders Patrick Andrae and Wolfgang Heigl, Lucy Capital, Expedite Ventures, Ralf Usbeck and the founders of FlixBus. Usbeck, who founded TravelTainment and Peakwork, has since joined the team.
The Series A is roughly 3.2 times the seed in size. That is a measured step for a company with seven-figure revenue, and it suggests investors are paying for traction in a narrow niche, not a broad market thesis. The investor roster leans heavily on people who built distribution businesses in European travel, which gives YGO ready introductions and also ties its fortunes to that network.
Why Does Travel Inventory Need Rebuilding for AI Agents?
Travel inventory needs rebuilding for agents because most of it sits in systems designed for human-operated search and intermediary-led distribution. Kögel said travel is one of the last major industries still built on infrastructure never designed for an AI-first world. Intermediaries typically retain 15-25% of each booking, which gives suppliers a clear incentive to find direct routes into the channels where customers now ask for recommendations.
Market forecasts put travel AI spending at about $2.95B in 2024, growing to $13.38B by 2030, a 28.7% annual rate. Forecasts of that kind tend to be generous. The practical question is whether large language model assistants actually complete bookings at volume, or remain a research step before travellers click through to a familiar site.
What Are the Risks?
The main risk is platform dependence. If OpenAI, Google or another assistant maker builds its own supplier connections, a middleware layer such as YGO's could be squeezed on price or bypassed. Established travel technology vendors and global distribution systems also hold incumbent supplier relationships and are moving into agent-ready APIs.
YGO's counter is data quality. Agents that hallucinate a room type or misstate a cancellation policy create liability for the supplier, and verified, structured content is harder to replicate than a connector. That argument holds only while suppliers keep paying for the enrichment work.
What Happens to the Money?
YGO will spend the proceeds on sales and go-to-market, further platform development, and converting its pipeline outside DACH. It is targeting enterprise and mid-sized travel companies in wider Europe. The raise gives it runway to close larger accounts, where sales cycles in travel are long and procurement is conservative.
Outlook
YGO enters its Series A year with revenue, recognisable airline and tour-operator customers, and a lead investor in Ventech that has funded European software companies at this stage before. The open questions are market timing and channel control: how quickly AI assistants take real booking volume, and whether suppliers prefer an independent layer over building their own. Customer count and non-DACH wins over the next twelve months will show which way that goes.
