Paris Hilton Backs Layla AI Trip Planner as ZeroAvia Raises $116M

When Paris Hilton writes a check into a seed-stage startup, the tech press tends to notice. But the more revealing story in travel-tech venture funding right now isn't the celebrity name on the term sheet — it's where sophisticated travel-industry money is flowing, and what that says about how investors believe artificial intelligence will reshape the way trips get planned and booked.

Berlin-based Layla, a new generative AI trip planner, has launched alongside a €3 million (about $3.3 million) seed round that includes Hilton alongside a striking roster of travel-industry veterans2. Booking.com co-founder Andy Phillips and Skyscanner co-founder Barry Smith both participated, and the round was led by Firstminute Capital — the fund established by lastminute.com co-founder Brent Hoberman — together with Los Angeles-based venture firm M131213.

What Layla Actually Does

Layla is the work of Jeremy Jauncey, founder of travel media brand Beautiful Destinations, and Saad Saeed, co-founder of German grocery-delivery unicorn Flink12. The product is a conversational travel planner that can be reached through an Apple or Android app, or simply by messaging the Instagram account @justasklayla2.

The thesis behind it is deceptively simple: travel discovery has already moved to social media, but trip planning hasn't. According to the American Express 2023 Global Travel Trends Report cited by the company, 75% of people have been inspired by social media when choosing a destination, and as many as 40% of younger consumers turn to Instagram or TikTok instead of Google search or maps12. Yet converting that inspiration into a booked trip still takes the average person more than ten hours spread across multiple platforms and sites over two to three weeks12.

Layla's answer is to collapse that gap. Users describe what they want — say, Maldives-quality beaches at a lower price point and without the crowds — and the chatbot returns destination suggestions paired with short-form vertical video, then flights, accommodation and activities aligned to budget and interests, with booking handled through Skyscanner and Booking.com integrations212. That content library matters: Beautiful Destinations has spent a decade building a community of more than 50 million followers and thousands of creators, and Layla is effectively turbo-charged by that bank of media and data12.

Jauncey's framing is blunt. "Travel discovery has been broken for decades," he said, arguing that people get inspired by short-form video first but have had no way to turn that inspiration into a trip13. Saeed puts it in distribution terms: billions of dollars of travel transactions originate in the social ecosystem but are never capitalized on there12.

The AI Funding Angle: Small Checks, Strategic Names

Here's the counterintuitive read worth committing to: the dollar amount here is almost irrelevant. €3 million is a modest seed round by any standard. What's notable is the composition of the cap table — and what it signals about where travel's incumbent class thinks the next disruption comes from.

Every major investor in this round built their name in an earlier wave of travel disruption. Hoberman founded lastminute.com in 1998, at the height of the first online-booking revolution12. Phillips and Smith helped build the comparison and marketplace layer that displaced the travel-agent middleman. Now that generation is placing bets that a conversational, social-native, AI-mediated layer will do to Google-and-OTA trip planning what the OTAs did to the high-street agency.

The pattern extends beyond this deal. Skift noted that Hilton's backing of Layla comes shortly after another social-media-based travel app announced backing from musician John Legend — part of a broader wave of celebrity capital flowing into travel tech2. Celebrity money is useful for distribution and buzz, but the strategic investors are the tell. When the people who built Booking.com and Skyscanner put personal capital into an AI-native interface that sits upstream of their own legacy funnels, they're hedging against the possibility that the funnel itself is about to change shape.

It's also a bet on a specific theory of AI value: not that large language models will replace travel companies wholesale, but that AI is the connective tissue that finally lets inspiration, planning and booking happen in one place, in a medium (messaging, short video) where younger consumers already spend their time. "Visual search is the future of travel for younger consumers," Saeed argues12.

The $116 Million Counterpoint: ZeroAvia

The same funding cycle that produced Layla's seed round also produced its opposite number: ZeroAvia, a startup developing hydrogen-electric jet engines, raised $116 million in a Series C round — by far the largest of seven travel-tech fundraises totaling more than $171 million over the two-week period Skift tracked211.

ZeroAvia is building propulsion systems to sell to aircraft manufacturers, and its buy-in is corporate rather than celebrity: American Airlines, Airbus and Alaska Airlines have all invested in or committed to the technology1. That investor list reflects the realities of hard-tech capital — hydrogen aviation requires hundreds of millions of dollars, industrial partnerships and years of certification, which is a fundamentally different funding game from a consumer AI seed round.

The contrast is the story. Travel-tech venture capital is currently flowing into two extremes: capital-light, AI-driven software bets aimed at the planning and booking layer, and capital-heavy, decarbonization-driven hardware bets aimed at the physical infrastructure of flight. Layla and ZeroAvia sit at those two poles. The messy, unglamorous middle — traditional OTA features, incremental travel products — is where the funding isn't going.

What This Means for AI Venture Funding in Travel

Read together, these deals describe a market that has decided AI-native travel planning is a category worth founding companies in now, before the category-defining company exists. Skift's own framing of the period emphasized that social-media-plus-AI is becoming travel tech's most watched thesis, with entertainers and industry founders alike converging on the same insight2.

The risks are obvious and worth stating plainly. A €3 million seed round gives Layla runway, not a moat. Its booking layer is powered by Skyscanner and Booking.com — the same incumbents whose founders invested in it — which means its economics depend on affiliate relationships with the companies it may eventually threaten. And consumer trust in AI remains shallow at the final transaction: later industry reporting found that only a small fraction of leisure travelers would let AI actually complete a booking for them, even as trust in AI-generated recommendations climbs. The planning layer is being automated well before the booking layer, and startups building there are racing to prove that influence over the first half of the funnel converts into economics.

Layla's founders would argue the moat is the content and the data — a decade of travel media assets and creator relationships that a generic chatbot can't replicate, married to Saeed's experience scaling one of Europe's fastest-growing tech companies1213. That's a plausible answer, but it's a seed-stage answer, and it will have to hold up against incumbents who are moving fast. The broader trajectory since Layla's round underscores the urgency: major hospitality brands including Hilton itself have since launched generative AI trip-planning tools of their own, with one AI planner logging more than 18,000 guest conversations and brands racing to integrate conversational interfaces into the booking flow1519.

The Bottom Line

Paris Hilton investing in an AI trip planner is a headline; the real news is the migration of travel's founding generation toward AI-native consumer products. Firstminute Capital and M13 leading a round for a Berlin startup that plans trips through Instagram DMs is venture capital making an argument: the next great travel company will look less like a search engine and more like a conversation — visual, social, and powered by models that understand what "somewhere like the Maldives, but cheaper" means1213.

ZeroAvia's $116 million makes the complementary argument on the hardware side: the plane you fly will change too, just on a much longer and more expensive timeline. Seven startups raising $171 million in two weeks is a healthy travel-tech cycle2. What's more interesting is that the money is bifurcating so sharply — into AI software at one end and green propulsion hardware at the other — with very little patience for anything in between. For founders and investors watching the AI venture funding landscape, travel just became one of the most legible verticals to read that shift in.