Headout has acquired the team behind Dabble, a startup founded by Neil Mathew, Prasenjit Mukherjee and Yan Ma to help build a new generation of AI-powered travel experiences for Headout users.
“The Dabble team sits at the cutting edge of the intersection of AI, computer vision and new media - a combination that makes them perfectly placed to help accelerate our mission of getting everyone to head out to the world’s best real life experiences”, said Headout CEO and co-founder, Varun Khona. “We’re huge believers in the positive impact of the age of AI. We foresee a world with improved human productivity and creativity freeing us up to make time for things that truly matter. From our very first meeting with the Dabble team, it was clear that we share a common ethos in leveraging AI to make a more human, a more joyful and a more magical world. I can’t wait to share and show some of the technology we are working on to make the best real life experiences even better in the coming months.”
Teams at Headout are already using AI across the board - from experiential media to content to fraud prevention to pricing and everything in between. The Dabble team will help structure our overall efforts towards AI and specifically work on infusing new magical experiences at every stage of our customer journey, both during discovery and the in-person delivery of the experience.
Dabble brings a wealth of experience deploying products that dabble between the digital and physical worlds. Backed by Y Combinator, Version One and others, they built one of the earliest AI platforms that enabled image recognition and augmented reality on mobile devices. They have also deployed immersive AR and VR experiences at multiple large venues across North America and have a deep understanding of the design and technical challenges involved in building location-aware technologies.
“What made us swipe right on Headout was our shared vision that AI can transform the way people experience the physical world around them”, said Neil Mathew, co-founder and CEO of Dabble. “With recent breakthroughs in large language models, computer vision, and immersive content, a disruptive transformation in real life experiences is inevitable and Headout is perfectly positioned to lead the charge as a managed marketplace curating only the world’s best real life experiences. We were impressed with the execution, ambition and resilience we saw in the entire Headout team and we’re thrilled to become a part of what is now our collective journey.”
About Headout
Headout is home to the world’s best real-life experiences — from expert-led tours and incredible landmarks to live events and activities, and everything in between.
In a world with increasing time spent on screens, there is a desperate need for a solution that augments the human experience by enabling interaction with the real world and the people in it. Headout’s mission, as a counter to this problem, is to be the easiest, fastest and the most delightful way for all of us to, as the name suggests, head out. It does this by running a managed marketplace where it actively creates and curates its experiences, upgrades the technology and delivery infrastructure for the experience providers and standardises the end service for a given experience across multiple experience providers to deliver a consistent high quality outcome.
It serves 125 cities around the world, in 8 languages, and has had more than 27 million people from 196 countries head out to one of its experiences. It has raised $60M+ from top-tier investors and is headquartered in New York with 9 global offices. For more, head to www.headout.com or reach out to press@headout.com.
About Dabble
Dabble is a YC-backed company built around the vision that technology can be designed to help us be more human, not less. Dabble’s mission is to help close the gap between the digital and real worlds through advanced research in Computer vision, AI and Spatial Computing, as well as a more humanistic approach to interface design. Over the last decade, Dabble has developed a computer vision and immersive 3D platform that has pioneered new design paradigms for in-person applications like indoor navigation, gaming, workplace training, and industrial asset inspection. Their developer tools have been used by 15,000 developers and have been deployed to over 300,000 devices, including mobile phones, drones and smart cameras.
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