What does it take to build a travel startup that gets acquired by one of the biggest B2B travel technology companies in the world?

<p>In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, I speak with Amit Shamni, founder of Bridgify, about building a technology layer for one of travel’s most fragmented categories — tours, activities and experiences — and the journey that ultimately led to Bridgify being acquired by HBX Group.</p><p><br />Amit started with a simple observation: booking flights and hotels online was easy, but finding and booking everything you actually do once you arrive was still incredibly fragmented. </p><p><br />Bridgify set out to fix that.</p><p><br />Today, its technology aggregates and normalizes an enormous range of experiences — from concerts and museums to safaris, scuba diving and tours — and makes that inventory available to businesses such as airlines, OTAs, hotels, credit-card companies and loyalty programs through APIs and white-label solutions. </p><p><br />We dig into:<br />🚀 How Amit tested the original idea with an app that cost just $1,150 to build<br />🍕 Why he used pizza, beer and traveller interviews to validate the concept before properly building the company<br />💰 Why Bridgify deliberately chose B2B2C rather than fighting for consumers directly<br />🌎 Why the company prioritized global coverage first and margin second<br />⏳ Why it took around 18 months to make the first dollar — and around three years before transactional revenue really started gaining momentum Pasted text<br />🧱 How years spent aggregating, cleaning, tagging and normalizing wildly different experience inventory created a significant technology and data moat<br />🎟️ Why a Taylor Swift concert, Dubai desert safari and Australian scuba dive can require completely different booking architecture<br />🛒 How Bridgify can potentially put products from multiple suppliers into one cart and one transaction — more like the GDS model created for airlines Pasted text<br />💳 How Bridgify works with loyalty programs, credit cards and membership businesses to use experiences as both a revenue stream and customer perk<br />🏨 Why HBX Group became such a natural strategic home for Bridgify — combining Bridgify's development speed and experiences infrastructure with HBX's enormous B2B distribution network<br />🤝 What the acquisition process looked like and why HBX had actually appeared in Bridgify's potential exit strategy years earlier </p><p><br />And then we get into where things become really interesting: AI and agentic commerce.</p><p><br />Amit believes AI is rapidly destroyin