NYC AI Travel Startup Odynn Raises $9.5M
Odynn, a New York-based AI platform that helps banks and fintechs create personalized travel and loyalty programs, has raised a $9.5 million seed round. The funding was led by Bonfire Ventures and Fiat Ventures. Odynn's vertical SaaS product uses AI to automate the delivery of tailored offers and experiences to drive customer engagement.
- Odynn was founded by John Taylor Garner, Anuj Patel, and Bruce Garner, who bring a combination of expertise in finance, AI, and enterprise software. CEO John Taylor Garner was previously at Merrill Lynch, CTO Anuj Patel developed LLMs at PwC and earned a master's in computer science from UPenn, and COO/CFO Bruce Garner has experience scaling teams at major banks like JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank. - The company's platform is described as an "AI Shopify for loyalty and travel," designed to enable banks and fintechs to launch their own personalized travel portals in weeks, a process that traditionally takes over 18 months. Early customers have reportedly seen a 108% increase in visits to their travel portals. - The funding will be used to expand its engineering and data science teams and to deepen integrations with card networks and loyalty programs. Odynn's current partners include Wildfire, Plusgrade, and Duffel, and it serves major clients like ANZ Bank, Bilt Rewards, and Curve. - Lead investor Bonfire Ventures is a Los Angeles-based VC firm that focuses on early-stage B2B software companies and manages over $1 billion in assets. Their portfolio includes other AI-focused startups like Operative Intelligence and Rwazi. - Co-lead investor Fiat Ventures, based in San Francisco, specializes in early-stage fintech and fintech-adjacent startups. Their investment focus includes financial democratization, embedded finance, and agentic AI. - Odynn is entering the vertical SaaS market for financial services, a sector where platforms are increasingly embedding financial products directly into their workflows to create a comprehensive operating system for a specific industry. This approach aims to increase revenue per customer and reduce churn by becoming essential to the client's operations. - The startup is capitalizing on the trend of using AI to hyper-personalize customer experiences in the travel and loyalty sector. This is a significant shift from transactional, points-based rewards to creating more emotional loyalty through tailored offers and anticipated needs, which particularly resonates with younger demographics.
