Seattle-based startup Otto announced the wide release Thursday of its AI-powered travel assistant — Otto the Agent — in a bid to bring a concierge-level experience and personalization to business travelers.
The platform has been in closed beta for nine months. GeekWire first reported about its stealthy operations in August 2024.
Founded by longtime travel industry veterans, Otto was incubated and spun out of Seattle-based Madrona Venture Labs, the former startup studio associated with Madrona.
“The goal here is to mimic or create as good or better an experience than the best ever executive assistant, to help you book your business travel,” said founder and CEO Michael Gulmann, who spent nearly a decade at Expedia Group in various leadership roles, and also worked at business travel management giant Egencia.
Steve Singh, managing director at Madrona who co-founded business expense software giant Concur, is executive chairman of Otto.
Otto is built to learn and understand an individual’s travel habits — airline and hotel preferences, seat choices, loyalty programs, and even nuanced needs like finding rooms that avoid train noise or finding hotels with rooftop bars. Gulmann said Otto uses that knowledge to instantly surface the best flights and hotels without the the typical endless-scroll experience.
And unlike general-purpose AI tools that send users to external booking sites, Otto handles the entire transaction end-to-end, from booking to cancellations to rebooking and credit management, all within the same interface.
Otto can also connect to a traveler’s calendar and proactively detect upcoming trips and suggest itineraries before the traveler asks.
Barney Harford, former CEO of Orbitz Worldwide and former COO of Uber, called Otto “a glimpse into the future,” saying that after using it for several months it knows his business travel preferences “and has simplified the shop and book process down to just a couple of minutes.” Harford is an investor in Otto.
Beyond flights and hotels, a clear next step in Otto’s development will be the addition of car rentals and dinner reservations — things an executive assistant “back home would be helping with when you’re on the road,” Gulmann said.
“The reality is, most people don’t have an EA,” he added. “A little bit of the genesis of the company was, I was fortunate enough to have an EA at Expedia for a long time, once I got to a certain level, and it was amazing.”
Otto is available for free to individual business travelers as well as small and mid-sized businesses for the next 12 months. The startup makes money on commissions. Through a partnership with travel management company Direct Travel, Otto is also launching upcoming pilot programs with two companies Gulmann could not yet name.
The company is competing with other startups, as well as incumbents that are developing their own AI-fueled tools.
Direct Travel, which was acquired by Madrona and others in April 2024, invested in Otto’s seed round.
Singh is also executive chairman at Direct Travel. Since departing Concur a few years after its $8.3 billion acquisition to SAP in 2014, Singh became executive chairman at Spotnana, a travel-as-a-service technology platform; at Center, a corporate card and expense management platform; and Troop, a group meetings and events company.
Gulmann said innovating around travel again was the “last thing he thought he’d get back into” but a lot has changed since Expedia and others came along to displace human travel agents in the 1990s. Otto is like going back to the personalization aspect of travel agents but with the tech twist added in.
“It’s insanely faster to develop and to build the product,” he said. “We’re doing it with, including myself, a 10-person team. So, not tiny, but nowhere near the developer and engineer horsepower that Expedia or Booking.com have. But yet, I think we’re going a lot faster than they are now.”
Related:
- The new AI executive assistants: Smarter, faster, still not as good as the real thing
