Ex-Meta Engineers Launch AI Travel Planner Airial with $3M in Funding

A new AI travel startup founded by two former Meta engineers is taking a detailed approach to trip planning—aiming to map out every leg of your journey, from transit to daily dining.

The platform, called Airial, was launched by Archit Karandikar and Sanjeev Shenoy, who met as college students in India. Karandikar previously held engineering roles at Meta, Google, and Waymo, while Shenoy helped develop Instagram Reels. Their shared passion for travel inspired them to build a smarter, more personalized solution for planning complex trips.

“Pretty much all the other companies we know in the space are focused on creating a rough plan for you,” Karandikar told TechCrunch. “With our models, we reason thoroughly over the logistics part of your trip with a focus on details.”

What Airial Can Do

At its core, Airial is built to function like an AI-powered travel agent—not just a chatbot. Users start by entering a few basic trip details, and the platform generates a complete itinerary that includes:

• Flights, trains, and ground transportation across multiple cities

• Hotel options with booking logistics

• Daily plans for sightseeing, dining, and optional day trips

• Real-time maps showing distances, transfer times, and more

Personalization and Collaboration

Karandikar said the startup’s value proposition lies in personalization and time-saving features. The system accounts for individual preferences—such as dietary needs—so a vegetarian traveler, for example, will see only relevant dining options.

The company also recently introduced trip sharing and collaborative planning, along with new multi-city transit options that now include cars and buses. In the months ahead, the team plans to launch iOS and Android apps for its platform, along with verticalized search features for hotels, activities, and influencer videos.

Interactive and Flexible Planning

Plans are fully interactive and easy to customize. Users can adjust their itinerary at any point and engage with the AI assistant for additional context. The interface presents an overview of the trip, with clickable phases that reveal each day’s schedule. Every item includes a detailed view with reviews, location data, and alternative suggestions. A map mode shows all the day’s destinations, helping travelers visualize distances and optimize their route. The system also includes practical logistics like transfer times, station wait times, and nearby day trip opportunities. Throughout the experience, the assistant is on hand to answer questions and help refine plans in real time.

Behind the Scenes: A Deep Planning Engine

What sets Airial apart is its deep planning infrastructure. It integrates dozens of APIs and evaluates thousands of variables to deliver precise, door-to-door itineraries. The AI accounts for flight and train schedules, local transit options, timing between stops, and the proximity of attractions to lodging.

The underlying engine draws on AlphaGeometry, a reasoning-based AI system developed by DeepMind to solve complex geometry problems. By combining that structured inference approach with large language models, Airial simulates the detailed, adaptive planning a human travel expert might provide—balancing efficiency, preferences, and real-world constraints at every step of the journey.

Social and Influencer-Driven Features

Airial also connects with the way people discover travel ideas today—through social media. Users can:

• Add links from blogs, TikToks, or Reels to pull experiences, locations, or even specific items mentioned by creators right into your itinerary.

• The tool automatically surfaces TikTok videos based on your chosen destination and travel details, so you can get inspired without even searching.

• View and modify friends’ trips through a new social planning feature

This social layer enables collaborative trip building, a feature Airial added as part of its recent update alongside support for cars and buses in multi-city planning.

Growth, Funding, and Roadmap

Airial has attracted tens of thousands of monthly users and is focused on growing its base before turning to monetization. The startup recently raised $3 million in seed funding, led by Montage Ventures with participation from South Park Commons, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India), and angel investors from Meta, UiPath, and Dropbox.

Daphne Che, principal at Montage Ventures, emphasized that Airial’s deep-tech foundation gives it an edge over other AI travel tools.

“It is hard for a company just using LLMs straight up to solve these problems,” Che said. “Airial’s tech stack can reason over thousands of variables to figure out the best spots and transport for you while keeping your requirements in mind.”

What This Means

The rise of AI in travel has brought an explosion of tools that can quickly generate itineraries—but most focus on surface-level suggestions or limited automation. Airial is taking a fundamentally different approach: building a deeply technical system designed to reason through the real-world complexities of trip planning. That includes everything from intercity transit timing to restaurant preferences to how long it actually takes to get from a train station to your hotel.

By prioritizing logistics, user intent, and social discovery in equal measure, Airial isn’t just helping travelers find where to go—it’s helping them understand how to make the most of their time once they’re there. This shift toward intelligent itinerary generation reflects a broader trend in AI: moving beyond content creation into real-world decision support.

If the company can deliver on its roadmap—especially with mobile apps and vertical search tools for hotels and influencer content—it could redefine what users expect from travel platforms. Instead of jumping between booking sites, review pages, and social media for inspiration, travelers could find all those layers stitched together in one interactive, personalized system.

Because when the details are handled for you, all that’s left is the joy of the journey.

Editor’s Note: This article was created by Alicia Shapiro, CMO of AiNews.com, with writing, image, and idea-generation support from ChatGPT, an AI assistant. However, the final perspective and editorial choices are solely Alicia Shapiro’s. Special thanks to ChatGPT for assistance with research and editorial support in crafting this article.