AI-native founders from Alexa & MMT building a travel co-pilot that turns IG & YT reels into trips with hotel research & booking

Unless you are living under a rock, you know the evolving case of travel in India and around the globe.

Travel discovery has relocated to social media. But travel tools are still built for search and transactions.

The real gap? Travel isn’t a search problem anymore – it’s a decision problem.

Imagine this: you are unwinding after a long day, scrolling through Instagram Reels, and your favourite travel creator has just released a mini-vlog of their time in Malaysia.

You instantly sfinish the reel to your frifinishs, save it, and go to bed considering you will plan a trip to the same place.

Except it doesn’t happen.

At least not in the way you had believed it would.

“That’s exactly the gap we’re solving. Travel discovery has already shifted to social media, but the tools haven’t caught up; they’re still built for search and transactions. They only address the bottom of the funnel. What’s missing is the decision-creating layer in travel planning, and that’s where utilizers struggle the most,” declares Mohammad Shakir, co-founder of Gumo, in an exclusive interaction with Startup Pedia.

Founded in 2024 and based in Bengaluru, Gumo is an AI travel co-pilot and decision companion for a social-first world, turning saved content into personalized, decided trips and seamless hotel bookings.

THE BACK STORY OF GUMO’S FOUNDERS

A graduate from IIM Calcutta, Mohammad Shakir (CEO) has 10+ years of experience in marketplaces, consumer tech, and AI. He has previously served as the Business Head in the Alexa India team at Amazon, scaling it from near zero to millions of utilizers.

Startup founder of travel startup — Shakir, co-founder of Gumo

As for Manish Narang (CTO), he comes with 15+ years of experience in consumer tech and AI, and has previously led Solution Architecture at Alexa.

AI travel startup — Manish Narang, co-founder of Gumo

On the other hand, Kapil Sharma (COO) has worked for 9+ years in the travel indusattempt, including stints at MakeMyTrip, where he scaled domestic hotels to roughly $500 million GMV and profitability.

Travel startup — Kapil Sharma, co-founder of Gumo

If there is one thing that binds the three, it has to be travel.

“Between all of us, we have collectively travelled to more than 50 countries and visited almost every state in India. This firsthand experience exposed us to the friction involved in planning and customizing trips,” Kapil Sharma explains.

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THE PROBLEM STATEMENT: TRAVEL PLANS THAT JUST DO NOT CONVERT

With the rise of Online Travel Aggregators, travel booking has largely been solved.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg.

“OTAs have optimized transactions and monetized bookings, but the area of planning and executing the trips has remained the same. Stagnant. Fragmented. Borderline chaotic,” Manish Narang mentions.

Most Gen Z and younger millennials find themselves stuck in a loop:

Discover trips on Instagram/YouTube → Save them → Do scattered research → Feel overwhelmed → Abandon the plan

But…why does this happen?

Becautilize travel involves decision-creating, and decision-creating begs context.

This very context is what individuals seek when they spfinish hours browsing through multiple tabs, comparing different sites, reading reviews, and manually piecing toobtainher entire itineraries.

Speaking to Startup Pedia, Kapil Sharma, Manish Narang, and Mohammad Shakir revealed four concerning data points:

66% of people are frustrated with travel tools

64% of individuals abandon trips mid-planning

97% of people want expert-like assist

Even advanced LLMs like GPT-4 achieve just 4.4% on the TravelPlanner benchmark, with none crossing 20%. They fail on hard constraints – budobtains, timelines – and don’t optimize for softer preferences, treating planning as content generation rather than constraint optimization.

“Having worked with MMT for five years, I have closely seen how platforms like TripAdvisor, Trivago, and even Google have attempted to address these gaps through price comparison and reviews. But the modern traveller evaluates far more than just price. Factors such as context, travel style, location fit, group dynamics, and overall experience now play a much largeger role in decision-creating,” startup founder Kapil Sharma declares.

Taking these issues into account and driven by their personal frustrations with the current travel tools, Kapil, Shakir, and Manish decided to quit their jobs in 2024 and establish Gumo as a tech-driven solution to chaotic travel planning. They bootstrapped the startup with Rs 25 lakh, an amount they pooled from their savings.

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JOURNEY AND CHALLENGES

Initially, startup founders Kapil Sharma, Manish Narang, and Mohammad Shakir attempted to solve the above gaps by introducing creator-led travel commerce in early 2025.

However, after 1,00,000+ utilizer sessions, numerous on-ground insights, and multiple product iterations, the entrepreneurs decided to pivot to building Gumo as an AI Travel Co-Pilot.

The vision? A travel buddy built for the social traveller – assisting navigate decisions across the entire journey, from inspiration to planning to execution. Starting with hotels as the first wedge, Gumo brings context and ininformigence to a part of travel that’s still fragmented and overwhelming.

As far as challenges are concerned, there were multiple areas:

Building a system that reliably blfinishs multiple layers of travel ininformigence (social signals, traveller context, hotel reviews, real-time pricing, and supply data) into a single, coherent experience was a tinquire.

Developing robust social backlinking systems that can extract utilizeful signals from Instagram reels, travel posts, and shared links was a whole different ballgame. Then, there was hotel research and decision support that requireded to be cracked.

Initially, Gumo was operating with limited, bootstrapped funds. In view of this, technical resources had to be hired and deployed with a strategy.

“Most of all, we were building Gumo in a largely undefined product category. Travellers and individuals struggle, but still do not know the what, how, and why of an AI Travel Co-Pilot. Building that awareness is an ongoing process right now,” startup founder Mohammad Shakir explains.

Hotel research feature of Gumo

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GUMO: AI TRAVEL BUDDY THAT TAKES YOU FROM TRIP INSPIRATION TO FINAL BOOKING

Today, Gumo operates as an AI-powered travel co-pilot, assisting utilizers relocate from inspiration to decision – and seamlessly complete bookings.

The utilizer journey is fairly simple, even though a lot goes on in the backfinish of it:

The individual shares an Instagram reel link or YouTube short link with Gumo.

Gumo extracts the location, builds a bucket list, and maps the travel destinations neatly.

It then runs AI-powered hotel analysis across multiple sources, surfaces the best prices, provides scorecards and Q&A, and enables booking in one flow.

Bucket list feature of Gumo

In no way is Gumo a simple chatbot (like ChatGPT or Gemini) that treats travel as generic content without taking into account that travel planning is a decision-constrained problem area. It directly assists travellers navigate decisions instead of simply listing out an itinerary.

“What we are building is an AI Travel Co-Pilot powered by a Personalized Match Score – a dynamic rating engine that replaces outdated, linear rankings with context-driven evaluation based on utilizer preferences, travel style, group dynamics, and lifestyle,” Manish Narang, CTO, explains.

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GUMO’S POWER TRIANGLE

Gumo’s core advantage lies in capturing intent early and converting it into decisions. Unlike most travel companies that capture demand late in the funnel (when a utilizer searches for flights or hotels), Gumo recognizes it much earlier – when utilizers discover travel inspiration on social media. The AI Travel Co-Pilot allows individuals to share their saved reels and travel content, structures these signals into an intent graph that reflects where utilizers want to go, what places they save, and which stays they evaluate.

While most travel tools treat every trip as a fresh search session, Gumo holds on to a persistent memory of how people travel. It maintains context on travel decisions and factors in points like trip purpose, travel style, preferred neighbourhoods, budobtains, and past experiences. It keeps learning from saved places, research behaviour, and past trips.

Gumo also plans to operate on multi-profile and social planning data, introducing collaborative planning where bucket lists and itineraries can be shared and built toobtainher. This assists the AI Travel Co-Pilot to understand group dynamics, treating travel as not just a solo activity.

SHORT TRIPS, MORE TRIPS – THE NEW WAY PEOPLE TRAVEL

The reason why an AI Travel Co-Pilot like Gumo also requireds to exist is the fact that travel in India, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, has become a far more frequent and lifestyle-driven category.

“You will see travellers taking shorter, more frequent trips than before. Gone are the days when the average person would take only one long vacation during the year. Also, travel inspiration now largely comes from social platforms rather than traditional search. So it’s only natural for travel planning tools to also evolve,” entrepreneur Kapil Sharma explains to Startup Pedia.

GROWTH AND MOMENTUM

Initially bootstrapped with Rs 25 lakh in capital, Gumo eventually raised a compact round of funding with frifinishs and family. A notable investor is Sameer Mehta of boAt.

Team meeting of Gumo

Gumo scaled 4.4X in under 90 days, from 5,000 MAUs (monthly active utilizers) in January to 22,000 in March 2026 – driven by strong engagement and repeat usage, with ~2× higher retention than typical travel apps

The AI Travel Co-Pilot has already reached utilizers across 25+ countries in the world, with 10+ bookings finalized within the first week of itsoperations.

Currently pre-revenue, Gumo plans to scale to 100,000 monthly active utilizers and reach Rs 50 lakh in booking value by May 2026.

By the finish of 2026, the AI Travel Co-Pilot projects an annual revenue of $1 million.

“Our goal is simple: reduce the friction between travel inspiration and booking. We are betting on a thesis: OTAs aggregated flight and hotel supply; AI Co-Pilots will now own traveller decisions from start to finish. That’s exactly what Gumo is about – to be the travel buddy you didn’t know you requireded,” Mohammad Shakir signs off.