Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2025: Obvlo

Obvlo

Headquarters: Scotland

CEO: Callum McPherson

Website: Obvlo

Founding date: 2021

Investment: $2 million

Obvlo is an AI solution for producing and maintaining personalized local content for any destination on earth. Hotel and travel brands use content from Obvlo in their digital journey to drive conversations and enhance guest experience. Unlike manually produced content, Obvlo provides rich and visual recommendations that are dynamically kept fresh, up to date and personalized to the end user.

PhocusWire coverage

STARTUP STAGE: Obvlo helps travel brands provide personalized destination content  

Founder Callum McPherson

Strategic goals for 2025

In 2024, Obvlo reduced the time to build out curated and personalized content for a new destination (like a medium-sized city) from two weeks to under one hour. This innovation has allowed our solution to scale and be useful to hotel chains and other travel verticals operating across many global destinations. The problem of producing and maintaining content grows with the number of destinations being served. This innovation is fueling expansion from the UK hotel market, where we have a strong presence, into European groups. In 2025 the goal is to expand further afield targeting the US and Asia.

Lessons learned since founding

We've gone through many twists and turns, beginning life as a B2C proposition during the pandemic. We started using emerging AI tools to solve our own challenges with scalability and as we did so, the potential to fix this wider issue for the B2B travel market became very clear. Producing and maintaining content at scale was an unsolved industry pain point and the trends towards personalization made this an ever greater opportunity. Knowing when to press forward and when to pivot has been crucial and customer obsession has kept us on the right path. We are fortunate now to have incredible customers like PPHE and Valor Hospitality who shape our roadmap and ensure our solutions get better every day.