A Swiss startup just secured €1.6 million to solve a problem most travelers never see: the crushing cost of searching for flights in an AI-driven world.
Zerosee, based in Zug, announced the pre-seed round today. Playfair, a London venture firm, led the investment with participation from Vento Ventures, TrueSight Ventures, Alpha Venture, and several angel investors from technology, travel, and financial services.
The funding arrives as flight search economics hit a breaking point. Airlines and travel agencies only earn revenue when customers book tickets. Yet their technology providers bill them for every search query answered, regardless of outcome.
Zerosee sells an API that predicts flight itineraries and prices rather than computing them from scratch. This approach lets airlines and agencies handle enormous search volumes generated by AI agents without incurring unsustainable costs.
The numbers tell a stark story. Zerosee reports that see-to-book ratios, meaning searches handled per actual booking, stood at 1:50 during the human travel agent era. Online travel agencies pushed that figure to 1:500. Metasearch platforms drove it past 1:10,000. AI travel agents and modern comparison tools now exceed 1:200,000.
At those volumes, computing every fare on legacy systems like GDS or airline infrastructure no longer pays for itself. Pricing a single itinerary between two airports requires resolving billions of fare-class combinations against constantly changing rules. Sellers absorb that computation cost whether anyone books or not.
OAG analysis cited by Zerosee shows searches per ticket sold climbed from roughly 100 to 200 in the early 2000s to 10,000 to 20,000 today. By 2030, that figure could reach 2 million as AI agents scale.
Zerosee was founded in 2025 by Simone Lini and George Hadjiyiannis. Lini previously served as Head of Partnerships for Google Travel, leading Google Flights’ OTA and metasearch partnerships across EMEA. He also founded Waynaut, acquired by Lastminute.com, where he later became Chief Commercial and Product Officer. Hadjiyiannis held VP of product roles at Kayak and brings engineering leadership experience from Google, NVIDIA, and eBay.
The company has signed letters of intent with several online travel partners ahead of initial pilots. The fresh capital will fund the launch of Zerosee API v1 and establishment of a machine learning team in Zurich.
