Evature
Develops a voice tech tool that understands customers’ travel requests and acts upon them.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| investor | €0.0 | round | |
N/A | Acquisition | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
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Evature was a technology firm established in 2009 by co-founders Barry Volinskey, who served as CEO, and Tal Weiss, the company's CTO. Based in Israel, the company specialized in Natural Language Processing (NLP) with a specific focus on the travel industry. The firm's core offering was the Expert Virtual Agent (EVA), a technology designed to power free-text search for online travel services. EVA functioned by interpreting a user's conversational language—whether text or voice—and translating it into a structured query to search for flights, hotels, and other travel options, aiming to simplify the booking process.
The business model centered on providing this advanced search capability to other companies in the travel sector, such as online travel agencies and booking platforms, to enhance their user experience and improve conversion rates. Evature's technology was designed to integrate into its clients' existing systems, offering features like semantic highlighting and the ability to hand off a conversation to a human agent when necessary. The company secured approximately $2.1 million in funding over three rounds, with notable investments from travel industry giants Concur and Amadeus. One significant investment was a $2 million seed round from Concur in November 2012 as the first investment from Concur's $150 million Perfect Trip fund.
After several years of operation and development, Evature was ultimately acqui-hired by Booking.com (through its subsidiary Active Hotels) on September 10, 2017. This move highlighted the growing importance of chatbot and natural language search technologies within the competitive online travel market, with Booking.com seeking to integrate Evature's specialized talent and technology.
Keywords: Evature, natural language processing, travel technology, chatbot, virtual travel agent, EVA, Expert Virtual Agent, online travel search, semantic search, Barry Volinskey, Tal Weiss, Concur, Amadeus, Booking.com acquisition, travel AI, NLP for travel, flight search technology, hotel booking engine, voice recognition travel