Manifesto
We're building the companion we always wished we had.
We grew up with cities we walked through without ever really understanding them. Silent façades, plaques we never read, museums rushed through.
The tools we have — search engines, maps, guides — answer questions. None keeps you company. None walks with you, lowers its voice before a cathedral, or remembers what moved you three cities ago.
Thaïa is the well-read friend we wish we'd had nearby: available, never preachy, attuned to the moment. Not an encyclopedia — a presence. We're starting with a few cities. We'll go as far as curiosity takes us.
— The Thaïa team
The market & why now
Huge demand, a window opening.
Cultural tourism has never been stronger — and real-time voice AI has just become good enough, and cheap enough, to serve it.
~$11T
Travel & tourism's contribution to global GDP (~10%)
WTTC, 2024~40%
Share of international tourism that is cultural
UNWTO, 2018100,000+
Museums worldwide — not counting monuments, sites and festivals
UNESCO, 2021≈ +27% / yr
Growth of AI in tourism (≈ $3.4 → $14B by 2030)
Grand View Research, 2025–2030Three public, citable sources; one vendor forecast.
The model
Two sides, one engine.
Consumer side
The Thaïa app: early access via the waitlist today, a premium experience tomorrow.
The subscription price is not set yet.
Cultural-venue side
Museums, monuments and festivals create their profile, publish their events and sell their tickets — Thaïa takes a commission on sales.
B2B ticketing is in development.
The mechanism
From a ticket to a stone saved.
When a venue sells its tickets in Thaïa, we take a commission. Our ambition: to give part of it to a dedicated heritage fund. That fund would help pay for real restoration — a roof, a fresco, a timber frame. Nothing is given today; the mechanism is being set up with our first partner venues. We won't set a public percentage until it's built and verifiable — we'd rather keep a promise than post a figure.
The forgotten heritage, first.
We want to start with the places that have neither a great patron nor a queue: small rural churches, chapels, underfunded frescoes and gothic interiors, listed sites living on borrowed time. The exact criteria — state of peril, lack of funding, public access — and a selection committee will be defined with heritage stakeholders as the fund takes shape, and made public. No list of “saved” sites appears here: there aren't any yet, and we won't invent them.
Transparency
An ambition, told honestly.
Founding ambition — fund in the worksA commitment without proof isn't one. In all honesty: to date, nothing has been collected, no entity is registered, no partner is signed — and we share no fixed percentage, no amount, no site already helped, because there are none. When the fund legally exists and a first share is given, we'll publish its structure, its governance, the share given and what was actually funded. Until then, this is our starting commitment, dated and public.
Who's behind it
Thaïa is not a thin wrapper: the value is in the experience layer, the curation, the conversational memory and the network of partner venues. The cultural knowledge base rests on open, verifiable data, durable and non-proprietary.
Enzo
Founder
The origin of Thaïa. Enzo had the intuition that a city could tell its story quietly, at the right moment — and has carried the product vision and the cultural-venue conversations ever since.
Théo
Co-founder
Builds Thaïa day to day — the app, the real-time voice and the cultural intelligence. At the intersection of technology, travel and AI, convinced that a place understood is a place lived differently.
Run a museum, a monument, a festival? Once ticketing opens, selling your tickets through Thaïa will reach new visitors — and feed the heritage fund.
See the venue offerThe first cities are coming.
Join the list for early access. No spam — just one message, when it's ready.