Our Mission
A trip you paid thousands for shouldn't slip through your fingers because the apps are dumb and the information is scattered. We built Audiala to fix that — and to bring back something travel has been quietly losing along the way: the story behind the place.
The Trip You Paid For
Most travelers we talk to describe the same arc. Months of saving and planning. A flight, a hotel, a few days carved out of a busy life. And then, on the ground, a slow leak: a museum closed on the wrong day, a restaurant that turned out to be a tourist trap, two hours wasted in line for something that wasn't worth it, a neighborhood missed entirely because nothing surfaced it.
The tools meant to help don't really help. Search engines surface ads. Review sites surface noise. Generic AI assistants give plausible answers but don't know what's open right now, don't know where you are, and aren't with you when you actually need them. The best parts of a city — the quiet courtyard, the unmarked door, the story behind the statue — stay invisible.
That gap between what you paid for and what you got is the problem we care about most.
Tourism Has a Story Problem, Too
There is a second, quieter loss. Travel has been steadily reduced to a checklist: photograph the landmark, queue for the viewpoint, tick the city off the list, move on. The history, the philosophy, the local lives that made a place worth being there in the first place — those are getting buried.
Cities are cultural memory. Every street, square, and façade carries layers of what people built, believed, fought over, and loved. Travel done well is one of the few remaining ways most of us encounter that memory directly. Done badly, it just adds another camera roll.
We think those two problems — the practical waste and the cultural one — are the same problem seen from two angles. A trip that lets you find the right things and understand why they matter is a trip you actually carry home.
The Companion Across Surfaces
Audiala is the AI travel companion designed to be with you across the whole arc of a trip:
- At your laptop, while you plan — building an itinerary that fits the way you travel, not a generic top-ten list.
- On your phone, while you walk — knowing where you are, what's open, what's around the corner, and which story is worth telling next.
- Inside the AI tools you already talk to — so the moment you ask an assistant about your destination, the answer is grounded in real, current, curated information rather than guesswork.
The same companion shows up on each surface, with the same memory of who you are and what you care about. That continuity is the product. A great trip is rarely planned in one sitting on one device, and travel apps that act like it is feel broken the moment you switch screens.
Why This Is Hard
Building this well requires three things to come together at once: deep, accurate, up-to-date content for thousands of places; a model of what you in particular find interesting; and a presence on every surface where travel decisions actually get made.
We've been quietly putting those pieces in place. Audiala covers more than 1,100 cities across 96 countries today, in 11 languages, and grows every week. The content is built by an AI pipeline we developed in-house that reduces the time to produce a careful, well-sourced city guide from hundreds of human hours to a handful of minutes — which is the only reason coverage at this scale is even possible. The pipeline is paired with an editorial process designed to keep the content honest: real sources, fact-checking, and confidence flags rather than glossy hallucination.
Personalization is what turns a library into a companion. We learn what kind of traveler you are — the ruins person, the food person, the architecture person, the family with two tired kids — and the experience reshapes around that, on every surface.
The People Behind It
Audiala is led by Guillaume Pernelle, a repeat founder whose previous deep-tech company was acquired in 2021. The product, the website, the content pipeline, and the AI systems behind them all share the same conviction: travel is one of the most meaningful things people still do, and the software around it should reflect that.
Guillaume works alongside a hand-picked network of trusted collaborators in engineering, content, and design — a group ready to scale into a full team as the company grows.
We're a Swiss company, headquartered between Lausanne and Geneva.
Where We're Going
The roadmap, in plain terms:
- Coverage everywhere. Every place worth visiting, in every major language, with content travelers can actually trust.
- A real planning workspace. A trip is a living document — it changes the night before you leave, it changes during the trip itself. The companion has to follow.
- In-trip intelligence that earns the name. Real awareness of where you are, what time it is, and what's actually open and worth your next hour.
- Cultural depth that respects you. Stories told by people who care about them, not flattened summaries optimized for clicks.
A traveler who comes home from a week away feeling like they actually saw the place — not just photographed it — is the only metric that ultimately matters. Everything else is in service of that.
Talk to Us
We love hearing from travelers, from people who run cultural institutions, from journalists writing about the future of travel, and from investors and partners who see the same opportunity we do.
Reach us at [email protected].