Malmö-based travel startup Avionero is preparing for a stock market listing, with its new share issue opening this week. The company believes the flight search industry, which has relied on the same logic for fifteen years with exact dates, exact destinations, and repeated searches, is no longer sufficient, neither for people nor for the AI agents that increasingly search for travel on their behalf.
Avionero’s search engine is built around how travelers actually think, using themes, date ranges, and broad regions rather than fixed parameters, and uses AI to rank a very large number of flight combinations in real time. Through established partnerships with Skyscanner, Kiwi.com, and Amadeus, the company offers one of the market’s broadest flight inventories.
“I invented the flexible search many years ago, and today the most popular part of the service is searching freely without locking yourself to specific dates. Instead, you can start from the weather, proximity to the beach, or almost anything. We use data from other search services, which increases the chances of finding and booking the best ticket price. As far as we know, no other service has such a large selection of flights,”
said founder and CEO Lars Kristensson
The timing is notable because AI agents have started searching for travel on behalf of users, and unlike humans, they do not stop searching on their own. According to industry observers such as Skift and Bain & Company, this is already pressuring the profitability of players built on older search logic. Avionero positions itself as a potential intermediary between AI agents and established online travel agencies and airlines, and says it has initiated discussions with Amadeus on the issue.
The company also highlights that it has negotiated a significantly larger share of revenues from its partners, 40 to 80 percent, compared to an industry norm of 20 to 40 percent.
The founder’s path to Avionero began unconventionally. As a young programmer, Kristensson won an AI programming championship as early as 2003 and was headhunted by a major game developer. He later moved to a flight booking company by chance and was surprised that the services were not adapted to how people actually book travel, forcing users to make many separate searches and compare the results themselves. Using his knowledge of AI technology and algorithm theory, he began digging into the problem, and the solution became Avionero.
“I was just fifteen years ahead of my time. Now behavior has caught up because AI services have accustomed users to expressing their wishes freely. The broad AI agents don’t work on booking sites, they are simply blocked because they bombard the flight search with thousands of searches for a single person,”
said Lars Kristensson.
The next step in Avionero’s development is a business-to-business service that licenses the technology to other companies, giving their users Avionero’s free search capabilities without overloading the systems. A pilot project is planned for late 2026, with a broader launch in 2027.
The new share issue also includes warrants with a nine-month maturity, which if fully exercised at the highest price could bring the company an additional 7 to 10 MSEK (approximately €670,000 to €950,000). The capital will be used to market the service.
“Those who have started using Avionero continue to use the service, and brand searches on Google have increased tenfold in a year and a half. And we have marketed ourselves with a limited budget. Now we will spend money on building the brand for real, to become a broadly popular service, and hopefully a people’s stock too,”
said Lars Kristensson.
The company’s business model also keeps costs low. Avionero does not handle bookings itself, but has contracts with suppliers who handle the booking and share the revenue with Avionero. The revenues therefore become pure profit, and no investments are needed to handle larger user volumes as traffic grows.
Unlike competitors that buy traffic separately for flights, hotels, and activities, Avionero gathers everything under a single paid traffic source, which the company says gives substantially better returns on marketing spend. Hotels, activities, and events are identified as future business areas.
The company’s board includes members with backgrounds from British Airways, American Express, and Northmill Bank, and the board and CEO together own around 65 percent of the company, an ownership commitment the company itself highlights as unusually strong ahead of a listing.
