Hi {{ first name | there }},

We spent last week celebrating 100 women (!) building the future of travel. If you haven’t seen the list yet, it’s here.

This week we're back to the regular feed: a €40M VC fund from one of travel retail's oldest family businesses, a busy radar full of M&A and raises, notes from SXSW from a WeRoad co-founder who was actually there, and a Pokémon Go rabbit hole that goes somewhere unexpected.

This one came out at the beginning of the month, right in the middle of ITB. I literally scrolled past it while walking through the noisy halls. But I've been sitting on it because it deserves more than a line in the radar, so here it is.

If you've ever walked through an airport duty-free shop and grabbed a bottle of perfume or a last-minute gift before boarding, there's a good chance you were in a Gebr. Heinemann store. You probably didn't know it by that name. Most people don't. The Hamburg-based family company runs travel retail across airports on 6 continents and posted €4.3 billion in turnover last year.

Around 2019, Heinemann launched GHARAGE, their internal innovation hub to build and invest in startups reshaping travel retail. They’ve been running it for years. Now it became something bigger: GHARAGE Ventures, an independent institutional fund with €40M behind it and a mandate that goes well beyond Heinemann's own walls.

The thesis comes from seeing the gaps in their own industry every day: fragmented systems, manual workflows, physical and digital layers that don't talk to each other. Instead of waiting for solutions to land in their inbox, they went looking for them. More than capital, a startup backed by GHARAGE gets access to hundreds of real airport locations to test and prove their product. Real inventory, real customers, real operations. It’s hard to find a proving ground like this.

💬 "Large parts of the airport and travel retail ecosystem remain structurally under-digitised," said Lennard Niemann, Managing Partner at GHARAGE Ventures.

Fund I will back roughly 30 companies from seed to Series A, operating from Berlin and Singapore. Portfolio already includes Bounce (luggage storage), FileAI (document automation), and Gumshoe AI.

We asked Fabio Bin (CMO of WeRoad) to share what stood out from this year's SXSW. He was in Austin for the US launch of WeRoad, the Italian group travel company known for building one of the most loyal communities in the space… and for the marketing campaigns that always make us smile. He caught a panel with Justine Palefsky, co-founder and CEO of Kindred, a company we featured not long ago, fresh off a $125M raise.

Massive FOMO on our end for not being there this year. Fabio was kind enough to share his notes with us 👀, and the video of Justine speaking. If you prefer to read the highlights, we got you. If you prefer your front row seat, keep scrolling.

When one of WeRoad’s co-founders flies to Austin to launch a new market, catches a panel by a startup founder who just raised $125M, and takes the time to write it all down and share it with us, we are here for it ✨

Thanks to Justine for saying it out loud, and to Fabio for taking the notes - and passing them on!

🇺🇸 Ramp acquires Juno, a guest travel platform built for non-employee travelers (like candidates, contractors, clients) the bit of business travel most tools have been skipping.

🇰🇷 RIAD raises an undisclosed seed bridge to accelerate the North American push of their AI agent platform that automates back-office operations for travel agencies and TMCs.

🇺🇸 eTip acquires Shiny Solutions, a workforce tech provider covering recruitment, scheduling, and performance recognition, expanding from digital tipping into a fuller hospitality workforce management stack.

🇺🇸 Bilt acquires Sion for $30M, a commission reconciliation platform used by 8,000+ travel advisors handling $7B in bookings.

🇮🇳 Atlys closes a $36M Series C led by Susquehanna Asia VC, with MakeMyTrip joining as a new investor to accelerate its push into new markets and AI-powered processing across 120+ countries.

🇮🇹 Mr. Franz rebrands to Hint and raises €500k pre-seed. It’s a travel app going against the algorithm: recommendations come from verified local contributors, not AI.

🕹️ Pokémon Go was mapping the world
While millions of people were catching Pokémon, they were also photographing the world: 30 billion images of streets, buildings, and urban spaces. Now they are using all of that to help robots navigate cities where GPS doesn't work well.

🔬 10 breakthrough technologies for 2026
Great overview from MIT on new technologies. From sodium-ion batteries, next-gen nuclear reactors, personalized gene editing, AI companions, genetically resurrected species, commercial space stations, and hyperscale AI data centers, among others. None of them are travel stories, but they sketch out the world we're walking into and how it will reshape the way we live and work. Super interesting.

See you next week,
Ana

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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