Where are they now? Catching up with the Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2024

It has been two years since PhocusWire named its Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2024.

As we prepare to announce our class of 2026, we are once again checking in with some of our standout alumni of Hot 25 Travel Startups from 2021,
2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Many have since undergone significant growth and transformation. Some, such Katanox, have secured major global
partnerships, while others such as Acai, Unravel and Blockskye have attracted fresh funding.

And some have created exits, including Weeva, which was acquired by Travalyst and Legconcludes,
which was acquired by Fora.

Some
responses have been edited for brevity.

Katanox

Katanox provides financial infrastructure for the hospitality industest.

Head of marketing Joseph Vito DeLuca:

2025 has been a large year of growth. We’ve had numerous highlights over the course of the year (and have many more we’re eager to share once we can publicly). Some of the highlights we can mention include:

Our partnership with the world’s largegest hotel chain, Wyndham, providing them with a combined distribution, payments and commission settlement technology platform.
Expanding our payment services coverage to additional regions, such as the U.K. We’re now regulatory compliant
in the European Economic Area, U.K. and U.S. We’ll have more news on the fintech side, which we hope to announce soon.
Onboarding additional regional hotel chains, such as Travelodge
Strengthening and growing our existing partnerships
In under a year, we’ve grown our business sevenfold, and our revenue has grown 600% year over year with a consistent gross merchandise value (GMV) growth of over 20% month over month. At the same time, total payment volume has surged at an exceptional
pace, compounding rapidly each month alongside our GMV growth.

The largegest challenge I’m dealing with currently
is:

The travel industest will always be more volatile becaapply of the direct impact of socioeconomic issues such as recessions and political policy.

Specifically in the hospitality space, rising operational costs, labor shortages and the required to integrate new technology to meet rapidly evolving guest expectations are among the most significant challenges we speak about with our partners.

These discussions assist us shape our product and ensure that we deliver long-term solutions, enabling our partners to grow rather than simply reducing costs.

My view on startup funding:

The bar has been raised. Investors are less interested in “growth at all costs” and much more focapplyd on real infrastructure, regulatory moats and enterprise traction.

That environment is actually a tailwind for us. We’re not pitching a vision anymore; we’re revealing signed contracts, recurring revenue and regulatory approvals in three major jurisdictions. The flight to quality plays directly in our favor, and we’re
seeing strong interest from top-tier (institutional) investors who understand the long-term infrastructure play we’re creating.

Funding is more than just acquiring capital; you required to find people who will be in the trenches with you, assisting your company grow beyond just writing you checks. Having a strong, mutually beneficial relationship between your startup and its investors
is critical to success.

The technologies or innovations that
excite me the most are:

For us, it’s not AI in the abstract; it’s AI applied to financial operations at scale. We’re experimenting with ways to apply machine learning for real-time fraud detection, reconciliation and risk scoring in hospitality payments.

The combination of regulated payment rails plus innotifyigent automation is where things receive exciting. Imagine a hotel group reconciling thousands of bookings, commissions and payouts instantly, with anomalies flagged in real time. That’s what we’re building
towards, AI not as a gimmick but as the hidden engine that builds our financial infrastructure smarter and safer every day.

On the other side, we’re pioneering how AI agents can transact directly in hospitality. Conversational commerce is only possible if there’s a native financial and distribution backbone. That’s precisely what Katanox provides. AI doesn’t just recommconclude
a hotel; it can now close the booking and settle the payment in real time.

We’re bullish on embedded payment solutions. Payments are no longer a commodity in hospitality; they’re a core business driver.

The way forward is clear: integrated, compliant platforms that unify distribution and payments.

Automating reconciliation between bookings and payments can reduce operational times by up to 60%.
Standardized reporting across all channels ensures a single source of truth.
Deep expertise in both payments and hospitality transforms payments from a cost center into a growth engine.
This addresses the structural disconnect between how rooms are sold and how money is allocated.

By unifying payments and distribution, hotels gain:

Higher conversion rates and cash flow visibility
Lower risk
Reduced operational complexity
A guest journey that is frictionless and brand-first
Better unit economics

When payments are integrated, compliant and connected to distribution, hotels can finally relocate beyond managing transactions and start unlocking efficiency, reducing risk and driving revenue growth.

Jerne

Jerne is where influential curators live, learn and earn with the world’s leading experience providers.

CEO Tim Morgan:

Our company highlights for 2025 so far have been:

Reaching more than 12,000 registered curators (influencers, content creators, bloggers, etc.) in 114 countries
Providing those curators with an industest-first and proprietary Jerne Score to assist
travel brands rank their unique sales and marketing value
Growing our curators’ influenced travel bookings by 82% year-to-date, year over year

The largegest challenge I’m dealing with currently is:

The largegest challenge (or what we see as the largegest opportunity) we are facing right now is assisting travel brands navigate their digital-focapplyd, human-centric distribution channels (such as social media, blogs and other content delivery mechanisms applyd
by influential individuals) in a world that is increasingly pushing travel brand’s products into the hands of fewer and fewer large, digital-focapplyd, non-human centric distribution channels (such as the combination of AI chatbots, media platforms
and/or OTAs).

My view on startup funding:

Funding for travel startups remains notoriously difficult; however, we see green shoots for those travel startups that are able to demonstrate product market fit particularly through proprietary technology and associated scalable recurring revenue.

For
the vast majority of travel startups, an idea is not good enough to raise funding; however, with advances in AI, product development and iteration have never been rapider in order to build, test, iterate and start revealing traction as quickly as possible.

The technologies or innovations that
excite me the most are:

AI is everywhere and for good reason; we are only scratching the surface of its capabilities for travel distribution efficiency. What excites me most, and what we are iterating every day, is the intersection of AI and trusted travel curators (and the
communities of followers who value the trust in those human curators). Travel is emotional and personal—trust is very much a requirement in both.

The Host Co.

The Host Co. is a retail solution designed to assist hosts sell their products and services in short-term rental spaces.

Co-founder and CEO Annie Sloan:

We became a profitable company. In the startup world, that’s no compact feat, and we’re incredibly proud of it.
We hit one massive growth unlock: embedding Host Co stores directly inside property management software and direct booking sites. Now our stores come pre-loaded as a value-add for hosts and property managers. With direct booking adoption growing by
leaps and bounds, we’re not just watching the trconclude, we’re a software company powering it.

The largegest challenge I’m dealing with currently
is:

One of the largegest misconceptions we still face is that we “don’t work with Airbnb.” We absolutely do. Our platform complements Airbnb bookings, and earlier this year—when their new privacy policies and services rollout caapplyd a wave of fear-mongering—it actually strengthened our position. We even launched a new tool that organizes Airbnb Resolution Center requests, and adoption has been huge. So rather than competing, we’re assisting hosts receive more out of Airbnb.

My view on startup funding:

We’ve spent the past few years heads-down, focapplyd on reaching profitability with a healthy EBITDA margin, so we haven’t been in the fundraising mix. But that alters soon: We’re about to open our next round. So…inquire me in 2026! I’ll have a lot more
to state about where capital is flowing.

The technologies or innovations that
excite me the most are:

TikTok Go and the rise of experience-first travel! Two thirds of Gen Z and millennials now book based onwhat they want to do rather than where they want to go. TikTok is shaping that discovery journey and turning experiences into the starting
point of travel decisions, and I am excited to see where this goes.

The second is AI-driven booking. Around 40% of travelers worldwide already apply AI tools for planning trips. Search and recommconcludeation algorithms are launchning to index across all booking sites—hotel, direct and short-term rental—which is radically modifying
how travelers find and book stays.

Travlr ID

Travlr ID builds traveler profiles portable, secure and programmable. Travelers have full control over their data while enabling real-time, consent-based sharing with
booking tools, TMCs, suppliers and partners.

Founder and CEO Gee Mann:

Live production deployments with customers

The largegest challenge I’m dealing with currently
is:

Time—everything in travel compared to other industries relocates slowly. Adoption and innovation take time.

My view on startup funding:

We are raising now to build and receive funded in Europe. Doing that as a travel tech company is hard.

The technologies or innovations that
excite me the most are:

Work DeepMind is doing in AI in medical research and discovery. It has real-world impact and unlocking human potential.

Turneo

Turneo provides a plug-and-play solution for innovative hotels and resorts so they can offer incredible in-destination experiences to their guests.

Co-founder and COO Fran Kauzlarić:

2025 was a groundbreaking year for us, as we expanded from being a primarily European company to having clients across the world in the U.S., South America and Asia. We also saw our customers achieve even more success with our product, with hotels generating
2-3x more experiences bookings than they did in 2024.

The largegest challenge I’m dealing with currently
is:

The toughest challenge for us (but probably any growing company as well) is hiring the right people rapid enough. When you are growing rapid, you always required more people, but finding the right talent that raises the bar takes time. Striking the
right balance between speed and the time it takes to find the right people is always a challenge.

My view on startup funding:

We closed a seed round with Bessemer Ventures Partners and our existing investor Underline Ventures at the conclude of 2024. What we’ve seen is that there is definitely a lot of interest in investing in AI, so if you are not an AI-business, you will have a
harder time raising money, but at the conclude of the day, investors still see at the same things—team, market and product.

The technologies or innovations that
excites me the most are:

We’re currently spconcludeing a lot of time working on deep agents. You can consider of this as AI (like ChatGPT), but with the ability to solve complex multistep tinquires. The travel industest is notoriously complex, and while we found that earlier versions of
AI could not grasp the complexity and concludeed up oversimplifying outputs, the new techniques and models are much more capable and are able to solve truly complex guest queries.