Zerolook, a Zug-based startup offering a business-to-business flight shopping API, today announced a €1.6 million (CHF 1.5 million/ $1.9 million) pre-Seed funding round.
The round was led by London-based Playfair, with participation from Vento Ventures, TrueSight Ventures, Alpha Venture and angels from technology, travel and financial services.
Simone Lini, CEO and co-founder of Zerolook, said, “Airlines and travel agencies only get paid when someone books, but their technology providers charge them to answer searches and can penalise excessive search volumes.
“Most searches, however, are someone deciding, not someone booking. Ask for the cheapest Greek island in June, and one question becomes thousands: every island, every date and every routing. Today, many of those searches cost more to answer than they are worth. Zerolook is changing that.”
Zerolook was founded in 2025 by Lini and George Hadjiyiannis. Lini previously held the position of Head of Partnerships for Google Travel, where he led Google Flights’ OTA and metasearch partnerships across EMEA and built the Things to Do vertical from inception. Before Google, he founded Waynaut, which was acquired by Lastminute.com, where he later served as Chief Commercial and Product Officer.
Hadjiyiannis was previously VP of product at Kayak, a leading flight metasearch platform. He has an engineering and product leadership background spanning Google, NVIDIA, and eBay. At Zerolook, George architects the prediction model and partner API infrastructure.
Zerolook sells an API that predicts flight itineraries and prices rather than computing them. This enables airlines and travel agencies to serve the search volume AI agents generate without the cost that currently makes it unservable.
The company states that flight shopping was built for humans, but AI search has broken the look-to-book math. According to Zerolook, look-to-book — the ratio of searches a shopping system handles to actual bookings — used to be 1:50 in the days of human travel agents.
“With OTAs, it climbed to 1:500. Metasearch pushed it past 1:10,000. AI travel agents and modern comparison tools take it past 1:200,000. At those volumes, computing every fare from scratch on a GDS or airline system stops paying for itself,” the company mentioned.
Zerolook notes that pricing an itinerary between two airports means resolving billions of itinerary and fare-class combinations against rules that change frequently. Sellers pay for that computation whether or not anyone books.
The company, citing OAG’s analysis, states the number of searches per ticket sold rose from roughly 100–200 in the early 2000s to 10,000–20,000 today and could reach 2 million by 2030 as AI agents scale.
The Swiss startup claims that its model, trained on historical fare, schedule and availability data, returns a predicted itinerary and price with a confidence score attached. Traffic that is currently blocked becomes traffic a seller can answer, unlocking additional revenue.
“There is no technical reason that this has to be a problem holding back the entire industry. It is the result of legacy decisions made decades ago; some dating from around the same time as the introduction of the 8-track tape. The infrastructure is long overdue for a modernisation, and we plan to do exactly that, but without requiring an overnight change in how the entire industry operates,” said George Hadjiyiannis, CTO and co-founder of Zerolook.
The company reports that it has signed letters of intent with a group of online travel partners ahead of first pilots. The round funds the launch of Zerolook API v1 and an ML team in Zurich.