By Lea Mira, HTN staff writer - 3.25.2026
Lobby, a Zurich-based travel technology startup founded in 2025 by Romy Abbrederis, Alex Mugrauer, and Muhammad Abdullah, has raised $2.2 million in funding from Founderful. While the funding amount is relatively modest, the company is focused on a segment of the market that has seen limited innovation from modern technology providers.
Lobby’s focus is on group and B2B bookings, particularly those that originate via email. Despite the broader digitization of travel, this remains a largely manual process across hotels, event venues, and other travel providers. Requests often arrive in unstructured formats, requiring staff to interpret details, check availability, apply negotiated rates, and build custom responses. The process is time-consuming and varies widely depending on the experience of the individual handling the request.
The founders’ background in travel and product development appears to have shaped the company’s approach. Rather than building a standalone tool, Lobby has focused on integrating with existing systems such as email platforms and property management systems, with the goal of fitting into workflows that are already in place. The platform connects with tools like Gmail and Outlook and can be integrated with PMS environments, with onboarding typically completed within a few days.
The core functionality centers on automating the lifecycle of a group booking request. The system reads inbound emails, identifies intent and requirements across more than 100 languages, checks availability, applies pricing logic, and drafts responses that can be reviewed or sent automatically. It also handles follow-ups, manages changes, and converts confirmed quotes into reservations or blocks. According to the company, this reduces response times significantly and improves the consistency of quotes, particularly for more complex bookings involving multiple room types, dates, or ancillary services.
Group bookings are a relatively small share of total transactions but tend to carry higher value and longer lead times. They are also one of the more operationally intensive parts of the business. As demand for meetings, events, and group travel continues to recover, many operators are seeing an increase in inbound requests without a corresponding increase in staffing. That dynamic has made this part of the workflow a more immediate area of focus.
Lobby’s expansion plans reflect that broader opportunity. While the company initially focused on hotels, it is now looking at adjacent segments including meetings and events, experiences and attractions, cruises, and airlines. These areas share similar characteristics: high-value bookings, fragmented demand, and processes that are still often handled manually.
The competitive landscape is somewhat fragmented. Established providers such as Cvent offer structured tools for managing group business, particularly in the meetings and events space, but these systems typically rely on form-based inputs rather than unstructured email requests. Large travel technology platforms like Amadeus and Sabre provide infrastructure and distribution capabilities but are less focused on automating front-end workflows. Property management systems from companies such as Mews and Oracle Hospitality support group reservations, though they generally depend on manual input or external tools to process inbound requests.
More recently, a number of startups have begun applying AI to customer communication and operations, particularly in areas like guest messaging and call handling. However, group bookings have been slower to attract attention, in part because of the variability and complexity involved. Each request can include multiple variables—dates, pricing structures, inventory constraints, and contractual terms—which makes standardization difficult.
Lobby’s approach is to work within that complexity rather than try to simplify it. By combining language models with rules-based logic and system integrations, the platform is designed to interpret requests and carry out the necessary steps across systems. The inclusion of a human-in-the-loop option, where staff can review and approve responses before they are sent, suggests the company is taking a gradual approach to automation rather than assuming full autonomy from the outset.
The company’s ability to scale will likely depend on how well it can maintain reliability as it expands into new segments and integrates with a wider range of systems. Travel remains a fragmented industry with a mix of modern and legacy technology, and integration challenges tend to increase with scale. At the same time, the potential upside is tied to efficiency gains in a part of the business that is both high-value and resource-intensive.
Lobby is still early in its development, but its focus on a specific operational bottleneck sets it apart from broader platform plays. As travel companies continue to look for ways to improve response times and manage complexity without adding headcount, tools that can streamline group bookings may find a receptive audience.