Meet the 17 finalists of the 2026 Global Startup Pitch

Blockskye, FCM and Kayak for Business have announced a strategic partnership to build an end-to-end corporate travel, payment and expense solution that they claim will fundamentally re-architect managed travel. The trio aims to combine Kayak’s global booking front end, FCM’s servicing and program expertise, and Blockskye’s blockchain-based payment and data infrastructure to challenge traditional, monolithic TMC–GDS–OBT stacks. The offering is pitched as a more flexible, transparent and data-rich ecosystem for corporates, with emphasis on direct connections, cleaner data flows and reduced reliance on legacy intermediaries.

Travelport has partnered with Cognizant and Anthropic to modernize its technology stack and embed advanced generative AI across its Travelport+ platform, aiming to speed product development and enhance retailing capabilities for agencies and suppliers. The collaboration will use Cognizant as the primary systems integrator and Anthropic’s Claude models to build new AI-driven tools for shopping, servicing, and agency workflows.

BCD Travel has implemented a new Model Context Protocol (MCP) framework across its Tripsource platform to orchestrate and standardize how multiple AI agents and data sources interact. The move is designed to make Tripsource more modular, interoperable and capable of delivering faster, more context-aware services to both travelers and travel managers. BCD positions MCP as the backbone for broader AI use across its ecosystem, enabling quicker deployment of new features and integrations.