Dudu Bus's subsidiary brand "Lobster Travel" secures nearly 100 million yuan in angel round funding to develop a global AI travel assistant

ME News message, on April 20 (UTC+8), recently, the AI travel brand “Lobster Travel” (RideClaw.ai) announced that it has completed an angel round financing of nearly 100 million RMB. As an AI personal mobility assistant deeply integrated with the open-source OpenClaw framework, “Lobster Travel” has been newly built by Dudu Bus. Its goal is to reshape global users’ travel experience through natural-language interaction and intelligent decision-making. This round of funding was jointly invested by multiple well-known institutions and industry investors. The funds will mainly be used for technological iteration of a multi-agent collaboration platform, the formation of an AI scientist team, and global market promotion and layout, further accelerating the large-scale adoption and dissemination of AI travel solutions.

0-commission era arrives: AI reshapes the big travel industry

In 2025, the global business travel market size is expected to reach 1.57 trillion USD, with a compound annual growth rate of over 6.6%. Under the wave of AI technology, travel—as a core daily-life scenario characterized by “high frequency, strong necessity, and high-stakes decisions”—is undergoing a fundamental restructuring of its underlying logic: from “people looking for information” to “AI executing on behalf of people.”

A key turning point of this restructuring will happen in early 2026: edge-side AI frameworks represented by OpenClaw will advance AI capability boundaries from “reasoning suggestions” to “end-to-end execution.” AI will no longer be just the “mouth” that gives recommendations—it will become the “hands” and “feet” that can truly complete the entire chain, including ride-hailing, ticket booking, and check-in. Lobster Travel defines itself as the “Manus” of travel scenarios. Manus solves office intelligence; Lobster Travel solves travel intelligence. The difference is: Lobster Travel doesn’t give suggestions—it completes it for you.

Core product logic: users input travel intent → AI identifies needs → real-time price comparisons across the entire web → intelligent planning → automatic booking. Throughout the entire process, there is no need for users to repeatedly switch among multiple platforms such as Ctrip, Fliggy, Didi, etc.

Traditional OTA platforms rely on commission take-rates (usually 10%~20% of the transaction amount), which leads to a three-way game: users pay hidden surcharges, merchants’ profits are damaged, and platforms profit through short-term arbitrage. Lobster Travel completely breaks this structure. Users pay through a subscription model, enjoying the best prices across the entire web, with zero hidden fees—saving both money and peace of mind. On the service-provider side, it skips the commission-cut link and connects directly with users, increasing revenue and reducing customer acquisition costs. And with membership fees as its core revenue, Lobster Travel retains users with extreme cost-effectiveness, ultimately achieving high retention, high repeat purchases, and stable cash flow.

Embrace the OpenClaw ecosystem: build an evolvable “Sage” multi-agent collaboration platform

Lobster Travel’s underlying technical architecture is deeply integrated with OpenClaw, an open-source project from the recent period. Currently, Lobster Travel’s developer team has released on GitHub the “Sage” multi-agent collaboration platform, making complex tasks simpler. “Big travel finds Lobster—make travel with Sage.” The chief model team at Lobster Travel explains: “Sage has built AI infrastructure for the entire travel industry that can be called upon, aiming to provide callable, evolvable travel intelligent agents for global AI developers and users.”

Based on the “Sage” multi-agent collaboration platform, “Lobster Travel” has launched Skills for vertical segments in the travel industry. Users can configure and install them with one click. Lobster Travel Skills and the product presentation have three core advantages: first, save money and worry less—price comparisons across the entire web and the lowest prices across the entire web. In addition to enabling “one-sentence” ride-hailing, booking airline tickets, and reserving hotels, it helps users choose the most cost-effective travel services, significantly reducing travel costs; second, intelligent matching—based on multidimensional data such as users’ historical preferences, real-time road conditions, and capacity distribution, it precisely recommends the optimal service suppliers to make travel smarter; third, end-to-end automation—from making reservations, itinerary management to fee settlement—throughout the whole process without manual intervention, truly freeing users’ hands.

Capital boost: nearly 100 million RMB in funding to power the second half of “AI + Travel”

“Lobster Travel” (RideClaw.ai) was jointly built by China’s leading smart mobility platform “Dudu Bus,” AI scientists, and an AI-native technology team. Its core team consists of a core algorithm team formed by key team members from Meta, Amazon Zoox, Lyft L5, Kimi, Tencent, and QS WORLD TOP20 professors, as well as PhDs from the University of New South Wales and Tsinghua University. Among them, Dudu Bus has already served more than 2000 enterprise customers and has more than 10 years of experience in the travel industry.

It is precisely these B2B experiences that enabled the team to accurately capture many pain points in corporate travel. “Enterprise customers with millions of employees said that they found that their corporate ride-hailing and ticket-booking applications are more expensive than individual bookings,” said Chen Zhichao, co-founder of Dudu Bus. “Executives care about overall travel costs, but the company doesn’t have an AI to help him optimize end-to-end; traditional systems cannot achieve personalized control to meet different employees’ different preferences; in addition, factors such as holiday price fluctuations lead to a large amount of approval work, which has become a common challenge in corporate travel management.”

“The essence of these problems is that there is no intelligent cost management,” Chen Zhichao added. Meanwhile, Dudu Bus’s decade-long accumulation in audience segmentation, supply chain data, and fulfillment capability has become Lobster Travel’s most core moat. The team expects that in the future AI era, the most valuable startups will definitely be those that can standardize offline service fulfillment. “Beyond being user-friendly, it’s also about being AI-friendly and large-model friendly. Lobster Travel brings together more data and travel services for different models to call. The company plans that within the next year, it will expand Lobster Travel’s services to more enterprise-level applications, quickly promote domestic and overseas markets in a subscription model, and provide more intelligent and personalized travel services to hundreds of millions of users.”

After this round of financing, Lobster Travel will increase R&D investment in areas including autonomous driving interface integration, multimodal interaction technologies, and travel big-data models, further achieving its goal of “an all-in-one AI travel butler.” The company plans that within the next year, it will expand the services of “Lobster Travel” to more countries nationwide and to the countries covered by OpenClaw, so as to provide more users with more intelligent and personalized travel services.

Investors’ views and messages

Meihua Venture Capital founding partner Wu Shichun: “We have long focused on AI’s deployment opportunities in vertical industries. Travel is a typical ‘high-frequency, strong-necessity, high-stakes decision’ scenario, and I believe Lobster Travel can become a great global company in the AI era.”

Xianfeng Changqing Xie Ran Jerry: “The Agent 2.0 era has arrived. Lobster Travel is not merely adding an AI chat box to travel; it has reconstructed the connection between people, vehicles, and services from the ground up, and the upgrade of travel modes will bring users a whole new life experience.”

Joyoung Group Li Junting: “‘Sage’ provides an AI underlying standard set for mainstream travel scenarios. It allows developers and users to obtain more efficient and more diversified travel services with fewer Tokens (tokens). I look forward to Lobster Travel bringing ‘travel freedom’ to users worldwide in the open-source era.”

(Source: Ifnar)