Joining a leading startup accelerator, relocating to the other side of the Atlantic, expanding our product offering, and more - February was a sizzling-hot month for Eddy Travels!
HIGHLIGHTS
Techstars Toronto, baby!
The biggest news of the month - we joined the Techstars Toronto startup accelerator program!
The Eddy Travels team with Sunil Sharma and Tariq Haddadin from the Techstars Toronto program.
From over 1,000 startups, only 10 were accepted into the program - and Eddy Travels was one of them. With that, we received a $120,000 investment that will allow us to continue developing and improving our AI-powered travel assistant.
The program has been phenomenal so far. Every day, we’re getting introductions to the best minds from the travel tech and AI industries, talking with potential angel investors and VC funds, getting invaluable feedback from the Techstars mentors (we had over 90 individual mentoring sessions in just three weeks!), and learning a great deal from all the other startups in the program.
Watch the video recording of our live Q&A session to learn more about our Techstars experience so far and let us know if you have any questions!
FbStart - Facebook’s global program for startups
Another great development - Eddy Travels was accepted to the FbStart program!
"Your app was chosen because of its impressive development so far and its potential for continued growth." 🔥🔥🔥
We are super excited to get all the advice and direct technical support from Facebook, as well as receive additional tools and services from their partners that will help us build and scale Eddy Travels.
Media Mentions
We are also very happy with the first interviews and media mentions we received in February. Check them out to learn more about our plans:
Techstars: Welcome 2019 Class of Techstars Toronto Accelerator,
Techvibes: A Deep Look Into the 2019 Techstars Toronto Class,
Techcrunch: Rakuten’s Viber chat app plans to charge to operate chatbots in controversial move,
Startup Lithuania: Startup of the Week: Eddy Travels,
BZN Start (in Lithuanian): Dirbtinį intelektą paverte kelionių agentu.
PRODUCT
Change Currency
Many of our users requested a way to change currency, and we delivered, launching the feature earlier this month!
Just type “change currency to X” and receive the next search results in your preferred currency.
We already support EUR, USD, CAD, and GBP, and we will add more currencies in the future.
Search for Car Rentals
In pursuit of becoming the best travel assistant, we can now help you rent a car as well.
Just type “car hire” or “car rent” to trigger the search.
Try it on your next trip abroad and let us know what you think.
DEVELOPMENT
When we first launched the Eddy Travels AI assistant, we relied heavily on using off-the-shelf language understanding solutions. However, we soon realized that they are too limiting for us.
That is why we are building a fully-custom language understanding system that will significantly improve the travel assistant’s functionalities. Right now, 99% of our development work is focused on that, so that we can move to the new system as soon as in mid-March.
Together with launching the currency change and car hire features, we made a dozen small bug fixes and conversation improvements. We also redesigned the flight cards, so that you can understand your travel options more easily.
Design aside, nothing beats finding flight tickets that are $330 cheaper on Eddy Travels than Google Flights:
An example of Eddy Travels finding flight tickets that are $330 cheaper than on Google Flights 🔥
TEAM
We are looking to hire three new people at Eddy Travels:
1) Customer Success Agent for the US timezone - this team member will be responsible for reviewing user conversations, responding to the “live agent” requests, documenting any conversation issues and bugs, and cooperating with the development team to improve the travel assistant. Previous experience with any machine learning-based products would be a huge advantage.
2) Machine Learning Engineer - working closely with Mangirdas, the candidate will be responsible for improving the natural language understanding capabilities of the chatbot by using Rasa Stack, TensorFlow, Docker, and similar tools.
3) Graphic Designer - with a growing number of marketing and development activities, we are looking for a graphic designer to assist us. The main responsibilities will include creating promotional material for both online and offline marketing campaigns, as well as helping with the visual side of the chatbot and our website.
If you know anyone who might be a good fit, let us know! Drop us a message via LinkedIn or send an email to info [[at]] eddytravels.com - thanks!
CONCLUSION
February was intense. We relocated to Toronto, joined the accelerator, and had almost 100 meetings with incredible mentors in just three weeks - all while developing the product further.
We feel it gave us a very solid foundation and we’re ready to take it even further in March.
Talk soon!
Eddy Travels is an AI travel assistant with the best travel deals just a message away. Over 4 million users worldwide chat with the AI assistant to get the cheapest and most convenient flight, hotel, and apartment offers in seconds. Cutting-edge technology for natural language understanding (NLU) and personalization is powering the Eddy Travels artificial intelligence chatbot.
Follow our journey:
- Facebook - Instagram - LinkedIn - Twitter -