- AI-based travel agent company XOKind announced it has raised $1.67 million in a seed funding round led by Section 32
XOKind recently emerged from stealth mode and announced that it raised a $1.67 million seed round of funding led by Section 32 with participation from angel investors Adam D’Angelo, Amir Khosrowshahi, Andreas Quandt, Bob Gunderson, Ishan Mukherjee, Naveen Rao, and The Operator Network (Avid Larizadeh Duggan, Chuck Dietrich, Frederic Kerrest, and Jacques Kerrest).
What does XOKind do? XOKind is building AI-based agents that help people plan and make decisions more easily.
“AI has great capacity to transform humankind but we’ve only experienced a small fraction of its impact in products today,” said Arjun Bansal, CEO of XOKind. “I am delighted to partner with long-time colleagues and friends to advance the benefits of AI in everyday products starting with travel.”
XOKind is going to launch its first product in the travel and leisure space in 2020.
“We support XOKind’s long term vision of building general artificial intelligence through a sustainable and positive stream of new products incorporating AI assistance to better the human experience,” added Bill Maris, lead investor in the round and Founder of Section 32. “The company is led by an outstanding group of people, whose credentials and intelligence are inspiring. We feel fortunate to work with Arjun, Yinyin, Scott and Sarah.”
The AI agents are going to learn users’ travel preferences via their calendars, emails, and photos as well as their social media and in-app interactions. The company intends to make user experience and privacy core to its value proposition.
“There is huge potential in rethinking travel given the capabilities unlocked by today’s machine learning advances, and I am looking forward to XOKind dramatically improving on what is possible,” explained Quora founder and CEO Adam D’Angelo and a board member of OpenAI.
The founding team of XOKind include Bansal (co-founder of Nervana Systems — which was acquired in 2016 by Intel), Yinyin Liu (head of data science from Nervana/Intel, RE.WORK’s Top 30 Woman in AI), and Scott Leishman (software engineer from Nervana/Intel), and Sarah Harris (product manager from Apple).
“I am excited about backing the talent at XOKind, because I believe they can deliver on the AI hype and build a product that puts users first and solves real-world problems for them,” explained Andreas Quandt, angel investor and analytics consultant to GetYourGuide.
