Consider a quiet inefficiency of modern life: most people return to the same handful of places, not for want of choice, but because the effort of finding something better, and then booking it, rarely feels worth the free evening it would fill. A world of things to do sits within a few kilometers of almost anyone, and most of it goes unlived, hiding in plain sight.
Awestruck was built to close that gap.
It is neither a directory to search nor a feed to scroll. It is a platform designed to understand a person and make the decision on their behalf. Awestruck draws the entire experience economy into a single place, from theme parks, resorts and helicopter rides to comedy nights, spa mornings, classes and the small outing two streets away, and sets an intelligence in front of all of it.
Users tell Awwee how they feel, how much they want to spend, and who they are with. Instead of returning a long list of options, the AI recommends one or two experiences it believes are the best fit and can book them in under a minute.
The platform is designed for a wide range of users: students with a free afternoon, couples planning an evening out, families looking for activities, working professionals unwinding after work, corporate teams planning outings, and travelers exploring a new city.
Building an AI for free-time
Awwee is powered by AI and deep learning. The system learns from user conversations, booking choices, repeat behavior, and how experiences perform over time. According to the company, each interaction helps the AI improve its understanding of what people enjoy and how they make decisions.
The founders believe recent advances in AI have made it possible to interpret a user’s intent more effectively than traditional search-based systems.
Awestruck is targeting the broader experience economy, which it estimates is worth between $250 and $310 billion annually for structured experiences alone. The company says the opportunity extends beyond tourism into everyday leisure activities booked close to home, all year round.
Demand is rising fast: in India, live events alone grew 44% in 2025. Spending in the cities Awestruck operates in is growing, and even a small share of a market this size is a very large business.
The founders chose Mumbai as their first market. It is one of the most demanding cities to launch in because people have endless options but very little time. However, their thinking was simple: if the AI could work in Mumbai, it could work anywhere. It now operates in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, and Thane.
The company says more than 500 businesses joined the platform before launch. It also claims that growth accelerated significantly after AI became the core of the product experience.
A different marketplace model
Unlike many marketplaces that charge listing or advertising fees, Awestruck says businesses can join the platform without either. Recommendations are based on user preferences rather than paid placements, allowing smaller operators to compete with big brands.
"Search was never the right tool for this," says Pancham SN Bannerrjee, Co-founder, CTO, and CEO. "People do not want a thousand options. They want the one thing that fits their mood, budget, and time. That requires understanding people, not just listing places.”
Awestruck has been built without external funding. "We’ve grown one city at a time, starting in Mumbai and expanding from there," says Namrata Agrawal Banerji, Co-founder and COO. "Businesses bring us experiences people can enjoy nearby, whether they take a few minutes or a few hours. We connect those experiences with the people most likely to enjoy them.”
She adds that businesses benefit from better-matched customers and lower cancellation rates.
The road ahead
Awestruck expects to reach more than 50 cities within two years and to open its first market beyond home, Dubai, next year, with online experiences to follow.
The ambition beneath that is far larger. Almost everything people do has long had a place to turn to, for work, for money, for travel, for what to watch and what to read. The hours in between, the ones we actually live for, never did. Awestruck is building that place: the first thing the world reaches for when it has time to spend and wants it to count.
It comes down to a question every person answers, quietly, several times a week. What should I do with the time that is mine? For most of history there has been no good way to answer it. Awestruck intends to be the answer, in every city, for anyone, for as long as people have free time to fill.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)
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