Ina Just and Johann Horch launch Voyager AI

Voyager AI launches: an AI platform for specialist travel providers — and a consolidation plan for 795 businesses

Ina Just founded the company and runs it as managing director. Johann Horch leads growth and acquisitions as Chief Growth Officer. For the first acquisition wave, the two are in talks with private equity investors about €20 million.

Weinböhla near Dresden, August 17, 2026 — Before there was a sales team, a campaign or a price list, eleven tour operators from six countries had asked whether they could have the software. Ina Just had built it for her own business. It has become Voyager AI GmbH: an AI platform for travel agencies, specialist tour operators and local agencies — and the first step of a plan to consolidate the fragmented European specialist travel market.

The platform takes over the work that surrounds the advice in an agency: qualifying incoming inquiries, preparing and translating the documents of local partners, transferring them into each agency's layout, pricing the trip, following up after a proposal is sent, booking with the service providers including vouchers and travel documents, and supporting travelers around the clock. Seven specialized agents cover the chain from the first inquiry to the return home and hand over to each other with full context. No case has to be set up again along the way. The advice itself stays with people.

The software has been running live for a month at Individual Journey, a tour operator specializing in Central Asia. The eleven inquiries came afterward, unsolicited — from Italy, Switzerland, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

"I built the software I would have needed myself"

The trigger was her own business. "After the sale of our software group I wanted to travel, and instead I sat at the computer twelve hours a day," says Ina Just. "Proposals came as PDFs, as Word documents, as PowerPoint. At an Italian agency we spoke with, one employee spends hours translating from Spanish and Russian into good Italian. For twenty years there was no software for this problem, only talks about digital transformation."

At first she did not want to sell the platform. "Others asked."

A market that is not dying of online portals

Horch leads growth and acquisitions. According to the company's own analysis, the DACH market (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) for specialist travel providers comprises around 795 owner-led businesses. A significant share of them will face an unresolved succession in the coming years.

"Travel agencies are not dying of online portals, they are dying of succession," says Johann Horch. "German tourism employs around 17,000 fewer people today than in 2019, and the number of apprentices has more than halved. The average owner of a business today has no successor."

The model reverses the usual sequence: first a business is equipped with the software, then equity is discussed — and only what grows is acquired. "I tell every owner in the first conversation that I want to buy their company," says Horch. "In my industry that counts as a mistake. I believe the opposite is right."

A lean seed round, €20 million for acquisitions

Voyager AI is financing product and build-out through an ongoing seed round with business angels and funding instruments of the Free State of Saxony. The capital for the consolidation explicitly does not come from it: for the first acquisition wave, Just and Horch are currently in talks with private equity investors about a volume of €20 million.

"You do not buy companies with angel money," says Horch. "We finance the software lean. For the acquisitions we need institutional capital — and a partner who understands that the return is not made at purchase but in the integration. I give up the valuation advantage at the front on purpose. The money is made after closing."

Twenty years, ten acquisitions, one exit

In 2006, Just and Horch founded Deutsche Software Engineering and Research GmbH in Görlitz, a spin-off of the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences. After the reverse IPO, Horch led niiio finance group AG as CEO, and Just led the operating company and later also the product of the listed company.

Between 2022 and 2024 the group acquired ten companies and integrated seven brands — Patronas, Fixhub, DSER, MiFID Recorder, Fundsaccess, Fundhero and Etops — at ten sites in five countries with around 300 employees onto one platform. Just was responsible for the due diligence on every transaction. The group was sold to Pollen Street Capital.

"We are building the same thing a second time," says Horch. "This time in an industry where nobody has started yet."

About Voyager AI

Voyager AI GmbH, based in Weinböhla near Dresden, develops AI-powered software for travel agencies, specialist tour operators and local travel agencies. The platform combines seven specialized agents that cover the entire process from the customer's first inquiry to the traveler's return — as a white-label solution in each agency's own look. The company was founded in 2026 and serves the specialist travel market in the German-speaking countries. Ina Just is managing director; Johann Horch is Chief Growth Officer.

www.voyagertravel.de

Press contact: Ina Just · ina@voyagertravel.de