CHF 1.5m · Pre-Seed · Software · Zug, Switzerland
Zug-based Zerolook has raised CHF 1.5m in pre-seed funding, led by Playfair with Vento Ventures, TrueSight Ventures, Alpha Venture and angels from technology, travel and financial services participating. The company said the round will fund the launch of Zerolook API v1, an ML team in Zurich, product delivery and support for its first customers.
Making exploratory flight search cheap enough to answer
Zerolook sells a business-to-business flight-shopping API for airlines, online travel agencies, metasearch engines and developers of AI travel applications. Rather than calculate every possible itinerary and live fare for each exploratory query, its model predicts itineraries and prices from historical fare, schedule and availability data, then returns a confidence score.
That distinction matters because travel sellers generally earn money when a traveller books, while their systems and distribution partners incur costs as they answer searches. A broad request such as “the cheapest Greek island in June” can fan out across destinations, dates, routes and fare classes. Zerolook argues that AI assistants intensify that imbalance by generating far more exploratory searches per potential booking.
The company’s product keeps prediction separate from fulfilment. Its API handles the search and pricing stage, while customers route a committed traveller into their existing NDC, GDS, consolidator or direct-connect channel. Commercially, that gives sellers a way to answer traffic they might otherwise throttle without replacing the booking infrastructure that already governs inventory, payment and ticketing.
The model’s value will therefore depend on more than low inference cost. Predicted options must be accurate and fresh enough to earn user trust, while the hand-off into live booking needs to minimise fare or availability surprises. Zerolook reported letters of intent with online-travel partners ahead of its first pilots; those deployments should test whether cheaper discovery produces incremental bookings rather than simply more queries.
Experience from both sides of flight distribution
Zerolook was founded in 2025 by Simone Lini and George Hadjiyiannis. Lini previously led Google Flights partnerships with online travel agencies and metasearch companies across EMEA, and earlier founded Waynaut, which was acquired by Lastminute.com. Hadjiyiannis was previously vice-president of product at Kayak and has held engineering and product roles at Google, NVIDIA and eBay.
That background is relevant to the company’s execution challenge: Zerolook must fit into the commercial and technical systems of travel sellers while changing only the expensive exploratory layer. The pre-seed round buys time to turn that industry thesis into an API that partners can test against real search volumes, conversion and booking hand-offs.
Explore this theme
Scaling Verticals with Deep Expertise — Nabil Toumi & Partech, hosted on EUVC · 23 March 2026. Toumi’s argument that domain-specific models and targeted workflows matter more than generic AI capability maps directly to Zerolook’s bet on specialised flight-search economics.
