Zug-based Zerolook raises €1.6 million to tackle AI-driven flight search costs

Zerolook, a Zurich-based technology company specializing in a business-to-business flight search API, has secured €1.6 million (CHF 1.5 million/ $1.9 million) in pre-Seed funding. The investment round was spearheaded by London-based Playfair, with further participation from Vento Ventures, TrueSight Ventures, Alpha Venture, and angel investors from the technology, travel, and financial services sectors.

Simone Lini, the CEO and co-founder of Zerolook, explained that airlines and travel agencies only profit when a booking is made, yet their technology providers charge them for processing searches and can penalise excessive search volumes. Zerolook aims to address this issue by altering the cost structure of search responses.

Founded in 2025 by Lini and George Hadjiyiannis, Zerolook initially brought together Lini, who had previously served as Head of Partnerships for Google Travel, and Hadjiyiannis, who held the position of VP of product at Kayak, a prominent flight metasearch platform. At Zerolook, Hadjiyiannis leads the development of the prediction model and partner API infrastructure.

Zerolook offers an API that predicts flight itineraries and prices, rather than calculating them. This approach allows airlines and travel agencies to handle the substantial search volume generated by AI agents without incurring the prohibitive costs associated with processing each search. The company highlights that flight shopping was initially designed for human users, but AI search has disrupted the look-to-book ratio, which has skyrocketed from 1:50 in the era of human travel agents to 1:200,000 with modern AI tools.

The company explains that determining the best price for a given itinerary involves solving for billions of possible combinations of fares and rules that change frequently. With each search, sellers are forced to pay for the computation, even if the search does not result in a booking. According to OAG’s analysis, the number of searches per ticket sold has surged from 100-200 in the early 2000s to 10,000-20,000 today and could reach 2 million by 2030 as AI agents continue to proliferate.

Zerolook claims its model, trained on historical fare, schedule, and availability data, can generate a predicted itinerary and price accompanied by a confidence score. By unblocking traffic that was previously deemed too costly to process, Zerolook aims to unlock additional revenue streams for its clients. The Swiss startup states that there is no technical barrier to solving this problem; it simply requires modernisation of the existing infrastructure, which has been outdated since the era of the 8-track tape.

The company anticipates launching Zerolook API v1 and expanding its ML team in Zurich using the funding secured in this round.