SnapTravel raises $8 million for a hotel booking service that works over chat –
Summary
Chatbots – automated bots that let you interact with a service or brand via messaging apps or SMS – haven’t yet become breakout hits, as a group. The startup itself was founded in spring 2016 by tech entrepreneurs Hussein Fazal, whose prior company AdParlor grew to $100+ million in revenue, then sold to AdKnowledge back in 2011; and Henry Shi, who previously built uMentioned and worked at Google, where he helped launch YouTube Music Insights. The company filters through thousands of hotels from sources, then leverages machine learning algorithms to narrow those down to the top options, based on factors like price, location, quality and overall value. With the additional funding, SnapTravel says it will invest further in its Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities in order to reduce the reliance on human agents as its scales. In this envisioned future, that would mean an automated bot would be able to understand a conversational input from a user, like “I’m going to New York next week Wednesday for a night, and need a room at the usual spot,” for example.