Hi {{ first name | there }},
Good to have you here. This edition we're looking at Nox Mobility, a Berlin startup betting that Europeans are ready to (properly) sleep on trains again. We're also covering Intrepid's acquisition of Altaï Group, and Timeshifter raising $2M to fix jet lag with light and caffeine. A few other rounds on the radar too.
Let's get into it!
Berlin-based Nox Mobility has closed a €2M pre-seed round led by IBB Ventures, with participation from Italian investor Tommaso Lucca and angel investors including Dr. Patrick Andrae, co-founder and CEO of HomeToGo.
The startup was founded in 2025 by Thibault Constant, Janek Smalla, and Artur Hasselbach. Thibault is not a founder who stumbled into rail - he spent years documenting, dissecting, and debating every night train in Europe, and built a community of 600,000 people who share the obsession. Nox is the inevitable result. Alongside him, Janek brings the operator muscle, coming from Bolt and Flix - two companies that know exactly what it takes to scale mobility across Europe.
For two decades, state rail operators abandoned overnight routes as budget airlines made short-haul flying cheaper, even as passenger demand never went away.
Nox is tackling both sides: refurbished interiors with more private rooms per carriage on the hardware side, and a full booking and hospitality platform on the software side.
The real challenge, as Thibault told us, is getting on the tracks. Night trains used to have priority slots at major stations; they no longer do. And that 7pm-9am window isn't negotiable: their own research shows demand drops off sharply after a 9am arrival.
💬 "Our study shows that after 9:00 the night train is not attractive anymore. Around 7:00 to 9:00 is the perfect window - and usually these track access slots are hard to get. Back in the days, night trains had priorities. They don't anymore, and that's one of the big challenges." said Thibault Constant, co-founder.
The good news: Nox has already secured a track slot, coaches, and an operating partner. A train on the tracks within 12 months is the target. The route announcement is coming… just not yet 👀
🇮🇳 CureMeAbroad raised $600K in pre-seed funding to streamline medical tourism services for international patients. The startup focuses on price transparency and logistical support for procedures ranging from elective surgeries to critical care.
🇺🇸 Timeshifter raised $2M to expand its science-based platform for managing jet lag and shift work fatigue. The company uses circadian biology research to provide personalized light exposure and caffeine intake schedules.
🇰🇷 Linkovation raised a seed round to develop Oases, a platform that provides family-customized independent travel itineraries powered by local experts.
🇨🇳 Lobster Mobility raised nearly €12M in a round to scale its AI travel assistant (RideClaw.ai) that automates cross-platform price comparisons and bookings. It is launched by Dudu Bus, a mobility platform that has served clients like Huawei, BYD, and ByteDance.
🇫🇷 Altaï Group was acquired by Intrepid Travel to scale its network of destination management companies and specialist travel brands. The deal makes France Intrepid's 4th largest market globally.
Flavio Rodrigues founded Digital Sardine and has spent over a decade working on paid search for travel brands, which makes him a useful voice right now, when most of the industry conversation has moved to AI. What follows is a conversation about where search demand in travel is actually landing in 2026, and what that means for acquisition.
Ana Metz: You talk about AI visibility differently than most people in this space. Where do you actually think we are?
Flavio Rodrigues: Most of the conversation is still too binary. Either "AI is killing search" or "nothing has changed." What's actually changing right now is very specific: organic click-through rates are dropping on informational queries. AI Overviews are absorbing that traffic directly on the search results page, so fewer people click through to websites - even when they search on Google. For travel brands that relied heavily on SEO for discovery, that's not theoretical. You're seeing it already in declining organic sessions without a corresponding drop in search demand. The demand hasn't disappeared. It's just being redistributed.
AM: And paid search is somehow protected from that?
FR: Not protected, but structurally advantaged, for now. Ads still sit above or alongside AI Overviews in most commercial queries. The intent hasn't gone anywhere: people are still searching for flights, specific hotels, car hire for a trip. What's changed is where the clicks land. In practice, what I'm seeing across accounts is that well-structured paid search programmes are absorbing part of the organic leakage. Poorly structured ones aren't. And that gap is not small - in audits, it's common to find 20-40% efficiency upside just from fixing structure and campaign segmentation. That's demand that already exists, not being captured.
AM: But isn't there a version of travel intent where AI search is genuinely better? It can't all still run through Google Ads.
FR: Yes, and ignoring that would be a mistake. Exploratory queries are clearly shifting - things like "where should I go in autumn," "best areas to stay in Lisbon," "3-day itinerary in Tokyo." AI handles those extremely well now, and most of that traffic wasn't converting efficiently through paid search anyway. Where AI is not replacing traditional search is on high-intent, transactional queries. Once someone knows what they want, they still go back to familiar search behaviour - specific flights, hotels, activities, rentals. That hasn't meaningfully changed. Paid search is a bottom-of-funnel channel. The problem isn't the channel; it's expecting it to solve top-of-funnel discovery.
AM: So where does that leave the average travel brand right now?
FR: Honestly, in a worse position than they think. Most accounts I look at are running on structures built years ago. They're still generating bookings, so nobody touches them - but that's not the same as them working well. The problems are just invisible until someone looks closely. Campaigns misaligned with how people actually search now, budgets allocated by habit rather than performance. Silent inefficiency. The AI conversation pulls focus away from this. It's genuinely interesting, which is exactly why it wins the room. Meanwhile paid search keeps leaking quietly in the background.
AM: Last one. If a reader takes nothing else from this, what's the single thing you'd want them to walk away with?
FR: AI visibility and paid search are not competing priorities, but they operate on completely different timelines. AI is a medium-term shift worth investing in thoughtfully. Paid search inefficiency is a present-tense problem that is already costing you bookings. If your account hasn't been seriously reviewed in the last year or two, you're almost certainly leaving demand on the table. Fix the system that's already driving revenue before you try to optimise for the next one.
Digital Sardine works with travel brands to improve paid search efficiency across 30+ markets.
If your account hasn’t been restructured recently, there’s a high chance you’re leaving demand on the table. We’re offering a free Google Ads audit. No pitch, just a clear view of what’s working, what isn’t, and where performance is being lost.
of travelers say AI search summaries give them enough detail to make an informed choice, without doing any further research.
Source: Amadeus Travel Dreams 2026
👵 Grandma tourism is officially a trend
GetYourGuide's bookings for workshops and classes more than doubled between 2023 and 2025, and 69% of travellers now prefer an older local guide. From pasta-making in Rome to macaron classes in Paris, people are choosing experiences - and grandmothers are becoming the most sought-after hosts in travel.
🌫️ Why does everything feel like a remake?
This esssay is about why we keep reaching for the past (in culture, in design, in the things we build) and what that says about our ability to imagine the future. If you've ever wondered why so much of what gets built today feels like an echo of something that already existed, this is worth taking a look at.
🏠 What gets lost when a culture scales
Soho House set out to build a global home for the creative class. This piece asks what happened along the way, and whether the thing they were selling was ever possible to replicate across 40 cities without hollowing it out. It focuses on a members club, but the question applies to pretty much anything we're building in travel right now.
See you next week,
Ana
Thank you for reading until the end.
The content of this newsletter is curated and published by Ana Metz, an innovation expert, passionate about technology and excited about the future of travel.
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