We're building the intelligence layer for experience economies.

LumAI is a company. SkiOperator and Yuki are our first two products. This is the story of how we got here and the people building it.

From 15 frustrating years of ski school admin to building the intelligence layer for winter sports.

Founder David Walton, has been running ski schools in the French Alps for 15 years. A notoriously complex product, he saw the supply side was broken; a tangled mess of spreadsheets, emails and messaging groups. It was inefficient, costly and frustrating. The consumer side was not much better.

Early conversations with ski schools across the Alps revealed the same problems in Chamonix, Verbier and Val d'Isere: multi-instructor businesses running complex winter operations on Excel.

David saw the solution: build both sides of the marketplace: operator tooling through SkiOperator and consumer discovery through Yuki. Each side makes the other stronger.

SkiOperator is live. Yuki is live. The beachhead is winter sports. The thesis is the wider experience economy.

Our mission

For too long, experience businesses have been trapped in outdated systems. We see you.

You're the adventure creators. The experience makers. Technology should empower.

Four things we hold to be true.

Operators first.

We build for the planner at the desk and the instructor on the slope, not for engineers writing case studies.

AI in the background.

Works automatically, 24-7, 365. No prompts to write. No dashboards to babysit, just frees your time.

Aligned incentives.

We only win when our customers win. Our pricing, products and roadmap reflect that.

Mountain time matters.

Every hour saved for an operator is an hour back on snow.

The operator building the platform they always needed.

Founder

David Walton

Founder & CEO

David co-founded and co-runs Peak Snowsports, a multi-resort ski school operating across Morzine, Avoriaz, Les Gets and Chatel. He holds the Level 4 International Ski Teaching Diploma and is a BASI Instructor Trainer and Examiner.

He also launched two UK retail stores plus the e-commerce operation for Peak Performance, then founded Plough, Surrey's first online farmers' market, now backed by Cambridge Social Ventures.

LumAI brings those threads together: operator experience, commerce execution and marketplace building.

Morzine + Surrey Hillsdavid.walton@joinlumai.com

Backed by operators who have built and scaled.

Chris Porter

NED - Technology

Two decades building human-centred technology, from IBM and Oracle to co-founding 6point6, which grew to 450+ employees before being acquired by Accenture in 2023.

Steve Paddock

NED - Finance

Commercial Finance Director with 17+ years across payments, fintech and travel, bringing strategic finance discipline for the seed-to-Series-A journey.

Emma Sheldon MBE

Advisor - Operating Partner

Non-Executive Director, Operating Partner and transformational coach across international investment, healthcare, advanced tech and the space sector.

Mark Wild

NED - Product

Strategic product leader with 20+ years in fintech and payments, turning business challenges into revenue opportunities through product strategy and partnerships.

Sam Baldwin

NED - Growth

Employee #9 at Skyscanner, helping take an unknown start-up to a $1.75B unicorn, with 20+ years across growth marketing and travel storytelling.

A working board, not a vanity list.

Each advisor is actively engaged and chosen for their ability to support LumAI in all areas of the business, from product and engineering to growth and operations.

Build the operating system for experience businesses.

Post-seed, we'll expand across engineering, AI/ML, growth and customer success.

Senior ML Engineer

Post-seed

Product Designer

Post-seed

Founding Sales

Post-seed

See open roles