Headout acquires YC-backed Dabble to bring AI to real-life travel experiences

Headout runs a managed marketplace that offers curated travel experiences including tours, cruises, adventure sports, and local activities across 125 cities in the world.

Headout, a startup that helps people book real-life travel experiences across the world, has acquired Y Combinator-backed Dabble to boost its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

Headout said this acquisition will help the startup build a new generation of AI-powered travel experiences for its users.

The startup, which counts Glade Brook Capital and Nexus Venture Partners among its investors, said it is already using AI across various areas including experiential media, content, fraud prevention, and pricing.

The Dabble team will now help these efforts and specifically work on infusing new AI experiences at every stage of the startup's customer journey, both during discovery and the in-person delivery of the experience, the firm said.

"The Dabble team sits at the cutting edge of the intersection of AI, computer vision and new media - a combination that makes them perfectly placed to help accelerate our mission of getting everyone to head out to the world's best real life experiences," said Headout co-founder Varun Khona.

Dabble was launched in 2021 by Neil Mathew, Yan Ma, and Prasenjit Mukherjee. It provided a virtual photo studio for e-commerce companies to create professional product photos without a physical photo shoot across various categories such as Furniture and Decor, Art, Wallpaper, and Tiling and Flooring.

Headout said the Dabble team built one of the earliest AI platforms that enabled image recognition and augmented reality (AR) on mobile devices.

They have also deployed immersive AR and virtual reality (VR) experiences at multiple large venues across North America and have a deep understanding of the design and technical challenges involved in building location-aware technologies, it said.

The firm also claimed that Dabble's developer tools have been used by 15,000 developers and have been deployed to over 300,000 devices, including mobile phones, drones and smart cameras.

"What made us swipe right on Headout was our shared vision that AI can transform the way people experience the physical world around them" Mathew said in a statement.

“With recent breakthroughs in large language models, computer vision, and immersive content, a disruptive transformation in real life experiences is inevitable and Headout is perfectly positioned to lead the charge as a managed marketplace" he said.

Founded in 2015 by Khona, Suren Sultania and Vikram Jit Singh, Headout runs a managed marketplace that offers curated travel experiences including tours, cruises, adventure sports, water sports, events, and local activities across 125 cities in the world.

The startup curates the supply (experiences), upgrades the technology and delivery infrastructure for the experience providers, and standardises the end service for a given experience across multiple experience providers to ensure consistent quality. It claims that this approach helps the startup deliver a higher conversion rate than the existing aggregators.

Headout claims to have served more than 27 million people from 196 countries with support for eight languages. The firm has raised over $60 million funding until now and claims to have become EBITDA profitable since 2021.

Headout has nine offices across the world including Bengaluru, Berlin, Barcelona, and London with headquarters in New York.