There are millions of investment dollars in the market right now, but it seems the hype around generative artificial intelligence may be making it harder for investors to make decisions.
While some of the traditional investors in travel such as Accel, General Catalyst and Lakestar all closed multi-million, even billion dollar fundings in recent months, it remains to be seen whether they will be channeled into the industry.
Aaron Gowell, the co-founder and CEO of SilverRail Technologies who has built and sold several companies, said what’s different with these investors is before they would have made early stage and growth stage investments but now it is all early stage.
“It’s $1 million to $20 million checks. That's it, because they want to bet on the next generation, not the last generation. So I think that's an interesting dynamic, and it remains to be seen if they actually start putting the money to work. But it's good to see that the money's out there.”
Gowell was joined in the PhocusWire studio by Rod Cuthbert, founder of Viator, which sold to Tripadvisor in 2014 for $200 million. While an investor himself, Cuthbert said the emergence of new technologies “throws everything into disarray.”
“If you had a plan, tear it up, start again with a blank piece of paper," he advised. "Anybody who is super confident about investments they’re making today in our space should dial that confidence down a little bit and get a lot more cautious.”
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He and Gowell agreed there is not enough proof yet of models working in the travel market.
“I think they’re going to make a lot of bets. The stat I’d heard was that there’s $10 trillion that has already been invested in the AI space and less than $10 billion in revenue collected,” Gowell said.
Cuthbert added that investors are “making it up right now, the so-called experts.”
“I mean, really, that's going out on a limb to try and be an expert on this stuff now. We’re in the first five minutes of many years of trying to understand how this is going to play out.”
The discussion moved on to the influence of Google, which SilverRail recently announced a rail search partnership with, and Google Maps and its potential to become the starting point for local and regional travel planning.
Uber and its various travel integrations also came up in the conversation, with Gowell and Cuthbert discussing how big and powerful it could become as well as its potential role in the connected trip.
Watch the full interview with PhocusWire senior report Linda Fox below.