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Travel startup Layla acquires AI itinerary building bot Roam Around

Travel startup Layla — backed by firstminute capital, M13, Booking.com co-founder Andy Phillipps, Skyscanner co-founder Barry Smith and Paris Hilton — said today that it has acquired AI-powered it

Layla taps into AI and creator content to build a travel recommendation app

Many companies are trying to use AI chatbots (beyond ChatGPT) in different industries — especially in the consumer sector. Berlin-based startup Layla is banking on this trend to build an eponymous c

Online travel giant Booking.com faces antitrust probe in Spain

More tech antitrust activity: Spain’s competition watchdog has opened an investigation into potential anti-competitive behavior by the Dutch online travel agency giant, Booking.com, following a

Kenya’s HotelOnline acquires hospitality software company HotelPlus

HotelOnline, a Kenya-based Yanolja-backed travel technology scale-up that fashions itself as an e-commerce and digital marketing enabler in the hospitality industry, has acquired HotelPlus, a software

Guesty books $170M to double down on property management tools for Airbnb and other rental platforms

Platforms like Airbnb have boomed with more consumers (and business users) than ever before keen to stay in private properties when traveling or working away from their usual home base. That’s a

Big Tech companies in the spotlight as South Africa investigates dominance abuse

Big Tech companies are facing increased scrutiny in South Africa for dominance abuse and anti-competitive behavior, just months after the country’s competition regulator, the Competition Commission

Airbnb is reinventing itself — Brian Chesky tells us why

We sat down with founder and CEO Brian Chesky to discuss the release, where Airbnb is headed and how he's planning for the future.

EU’s digital rule-book reboot could fumble dark patterns ban and trader checks, warns BEUC

When the European Commission presented its Digital Services Act (DSA) proposal in December 2020, it listed beefed up consumer protections as a headline goal for the flagship update to the bloc’s

Amenitiz gets $30M for SaaS it bills as ‘Shopify for hotels’

Barcelona-based Amenitiz, which sells software-as-a-service for streamlining the administration of independent hotels and B&Bs which it shorthands as ‘Shopify for hotels’, has closed a

How Europe has expanded its bid to disrupt Big Tech

The European Union’s co-legislators reached political agreement on a major reform of digital competition rules late yesterday, which will introduce up-front obligations and restrictions (literal

Sleek wants to be the last shopping check-out form you ever fill out

Sleek is developing a browser extension enabling one-click checkout and cash-back savings.

This UK startup got $9M so you’ll pay it to shrink your household bills

The UK’s cost of living crisis has been making grim headlines for months — with no respite in sight. Just this week, newspapers reported that inflation had hit 5.5%, a 30-year high, furthe

African fintech Flutterwave triples valuation to over $3B after $250M Series D

African fintech Flutterwave has raised $250 million in a Series D round that tripled the company’s valuation to over $3 billion in just twelve months. In March 2021, the San Francisco-headquartered

Travel booking app Hopper upgrades its valuation to $5B on secondary sale

Hopper, the mobile travel booking startup and app that lets users book flights, hotels, cars, and — most recently — short-term home rentals a la Airbnb and VRBO, has been on a fast pace of

Deliverect raises $150M at a $1.4B+ valuation to streamline online and offline food orders

As we have started to see the light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel, food delivery has shaped up to continue to be a major business. In England, for example, some 76% of people order at least one ta

TravelPerk adds $115M to equity and debt Series D, discloses unicorn valuation

SME-focused business travel booking platform TravelPerk has topped up the $160 million in equity and debt it raised last in a Series D last April with an additional $115 million — closing out th

European Parliament’s IMCO backs limits on tech giants’ ability to run tracking ads

In what looks like bad news for adtech giants like Facebook and Google, MEPs in the European Parliament have voted for tougher restrictions on how internet users’ data can be combined for ad tar

OTA Insight books $80M for its hospitality business intelligence tools, used by 55K hotel properties globally

Travel and tourism, two of the hardest-hit industries in the COVID-19 pandemic, are slowly starting to show some signs of recovery. Now, OTA Insight — a company that builds business intelligence

Elude secures additional funding as it aims to improve travel booking experience

Elude launched on iOS, but has plans to launch a web version and Android version in the coming months.

ClickUp raises $400M at a $4B valuation to expand its all-in-one workplace productivity platform to Europe

Companies like Slack and Asana stormed into the world of tech to steal a march on incumbents like Microsoft in providing a new wave of point solutions to make it easier for workers respectively to cha
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