Airbnb has acquired a secretive new AI startup, GamePlanner.AI, the corporate introduced this morning. CNBC reports that the acquisition worth was round $200 million, a determine that TechCrunch was unable to substantiate at publication time.
GamePlanner was co-founded by Adam Cheyer and Siamak Hodjat. Cheyer famously helped co-launch the startup Siri, which Apple acquired and whose know-how grew to become the premise for Apple’s AI-powered Siri assistant. Hodjat beforehand labored with Cheyer at Viv Labs, a agency that Samsung purchased and leveraged to launch its personal AI assistant, Bixby, in 2017.
It’s not instantly clear what GamePlanner does. A LinkedIn search solely turns up two associates: Gabe Greenbaum, a basic accomplice at B Capital who sits on GamePlanner’s board of administrators, and Joseph Huang, head of design at GamePlanner. GamePlanner hasn’t had an online presence for a while; the Web Archive’s earliest cache of the web site (from December 2021) yields a clean web page.
However in a canned assertion, Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky hinted that the 12-person startup combines experience in AI and design towards crafting AI-driven experiences, form of like an AI-focused consultancy.
“AI will quickly alter our world greater than some other know-how in our lifetime, however we have to be certain that it augments humanity in a optimistic method,” Chesky mentioned, including that the GamePlanner staff will give attention to “accelerating” choose AI initiatives and integrating their tooling into Airbnb’s platform. “Airbnb is among the extra humanistic corporations in know-how, and I imagine that, along with Adam and his staff, we are able to develop a number of the greatest interfaces and sensible purposes for AI.”
Chesky has made his AI ambitions for Airbnb clear within the current previous, saying that he needs to make use of generative AI to construct a “journey concierge” that learns about — and adapts to — vacationers. On condition that GamePlanner marks Airbnb’s first acquisition since 2019 (and its first as a public firm), it appears he’s critical about bringing that imaginative and prescient to fruition.