Rihla AI Travel Companion
Investor overview · Doha, Qatar · 2026
The AI layer for Qatar's visitor economy.
Investor overview · Doha, Qatar · 2026
The AI layer for Qatar's visitor economy.
A visitor stitches together search results, generic itinerary blogs, five booking apps, a currency converter and a visa portal, mostly in English only. Generic AI planners make it worse: they invent venues and prices. Nothing speaks Qatar, and nothing is accountable to a budget.
Rihla plans a costed day-by-day itinerary in one chat, grounded in a curated database of real Doha venues and price ranges, so it never invents. Deterministic budget math, one-tap booking hand-offs, receipt-OCR expense tracking, visa guidance and safety tools. Bilingual English/Arabic with full RTL.
The demo below is the live product planning a real weekend.
The state is investing in stadiums, museums, cruise terminals and campaigns to fill the country with visitors. The digital companion those visitors will use is still unclaimed.
*Qatar Tourism published statistics and National Tourism Strategy 2030 targets; figures rounded, to be refreshed at fundraise.
Affiliate and referral fees on rides, hotels, activities and tickets booked through Rihla's hand-offs.
Subscription for power features: unlimited trips, family sharing, premium concierge-grade planning.
White-label planning for hotels, DMCs and Qatar tourism operators; featured-venue placements kept clearly labeled.
Qatar already has a strong AI trip planner: Visit Qatar's GenAI Concierge, built on Azure OpenAI, plans in 50+ languages and has logged roughly a million interactions. We read that as proof the demand is real. It answers “what should I do?”. The question still unanswered is “can I afford it, did I book it, and what have I spent?”
| Visit Qatar Concierge | Generic AI chat | Global travel apps | Rihla | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conversational planning, Arabic | strong | weak | rare | native |
| Real local venues & prices | official listings | invents | partial | curated + grounded |
| Budget accountability | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | deterministic engine |
| In-trip spend & receipt capture | ✗ | ✗ | separate app | built in |
| Qatar bookings (Karwa, Hayya…) | links out | ✗ | ✗ | built in |
| Residents & business travellers | inbound tourists | generic | generic | core audience |
| End-to-end (plan→book→spend) | plan only | ✗ | fragmented | one companion |
The risk we'd name before you do: if Visit Qatar adds budgeting and expenses, our advantage narrows to residents and local data depth. That is precisely why we build for the whole journey and for people who live here. That is the part an inbound-tourism concierge is not chartered to own.
Full product: AI planner with venue grounding & memory, budget engine, bookings, receipt-OCR expenses, documents, wallet, visa/safety, EN/AR. Hardened with auth, encryption and rate limits, plus CI and E2E tests.
Public launch & analytics-driven iteration · native iOS/Android (Capacitor) · licensed payment processor · first operator partnerships.
Qatar Travel Mart 2026, positioning Rihla as the AI companion for Visit Qatar's audience.
Founder, product and vision. Building Rihla end-to-end from Doha.
Engineering. (Bio to be added.)
Engineering. (Bio to be added.)
To take a built product to public launch, native mobile, and Qatar Travel Mart 2026. Full financial deck and data room available under NDA.
Talk to the founder