By Ariel Blum

“Siri, find me two tickets to the new Spider-Man movie tonight” is not an uncommon voice command for the iPhone, and Apple’s software is smart enough to recommend screening times and nearby theaters before taking your credit card information and generating your digital ticket.

“Book me a flight from Tel Aviv to New York for two weeks, anytime in May, in business class at the lowest fare” is a lot harder for Siri – or any software application – to make sense of. But Tel Aviv startup Evature has built a cool technology to help travel websites understand natural-language queries and to provide a “travel agent-like experience,” says the company’s CEO and co-founder Barry Volinskey.

The concept is groundbreaking enough that Evature took top honors at the travel industry’s biggest tech conference – the PhoCusWright 2011 Travel Industry Summit – receiving the DEMO award for the “most game-changing travel innovation.”

That conference led to Concur Technologies, a leading business travel company, investing $2 million in Evature in October 2012 as part of Concur’s new $150 million “Concur Perfect Trip Fund.”

Concur will undoubtedly become an Evature customer as well. That’s because Evature’s business model is not to build a standalone consumer website, but rather to sell its technology to other travel sites. To date, five have been announced: Amargo, a Russian site that sports an Evature free text field at center stage (you can type in Russian, English and Chinese); the UK’s On Holiday Group, specializing in charter flights; as well as Skyscanner, Travelport and iCruise.com. Another 10 or so deals are in the process, according to Volinskey.

The company, launched in mid-2010, is already profitable.

The founder of Evature (for “expert virtual agent”) is a frequent flyer himself. Volinskey, who’s been in business development and marketing with Israel-based startups since gaining his engineering degree from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and an MBA from Tel Aviv University, says that he’s often spent half of every year in transit. He has platinum cards on several different airlines to prove it.

And yet, he mostly worked with travel agents rather than the online booking sites that might have saved him money. “I just wanted to say, ‘Get me to Manhattan in time for a meeting Tuesday afternoon,’ and let the agent sort out the whole puzzle,” he explains.

Evature’s software uses travel-savvy algorithms to understand a large number of travel parameters (such as which airports go with which city) and to translate free text requests into the standard fields a travel website can work with. If follow-up is needed to clarify something, that can be done using an Evature natural-language field, too.

Volinskey says Evature is also working on tools for human travel agents to type in their own natural-language queries.

“Travel agents have to study a large number of short codes, which makes training very intensive,” he explains. Evature could simplify that learning curve.

While Evature’s current partners are all on the web, it’s mobile where Evature is planning its biggest push. “The small screens of mobile devices make filling in forms even harder,” Volinskey says.

The voice-to-text translation technology doesn’t originate with Evature – many companies offer that service, including Google. That’s why Evature’s first mobile app is for Android; an iPhone version is due out in the spring.

Couldn’t Apple walk into Evature’s space with its popular Siri product? The business models are entirely different, Volinskey says.

“Siri directs users to whichever site Apple chooses. But a site like Booking.com, for example, wants its own natural-language search engine” that won’t send potential customers to a competitor. In this model, Evature would charge Booking.com a fee based on usage.

Google could also be a potential competitor – after all, the search engine giant bought the industry’s leading travel booking engine, ITA. Volinskey isn’t worried here either. If anything, the ITA acquisition “has created a sense of urgency for the other companies to become less conservative” and as a result, he believes, more willing to partner with a service like Evature.

Volinskey, 42, looked at a number of different business verticals (finance, health and human resources were all considered) before deciding that travel presented both the greatest need and business opportunity.

“We were looking for a market with a human being whose job it was to understand a customer’s needs and to translate that, in this case, into an itinerary,” he says. Evature essentially digitizes the process.

Volinskey insists that the system is 85 percent accurate (“Even a human agent is only 96 percent correct,” he points out) and if it gets the command wrong on the first try, web users can simply refine their terms and try again.

Evature plans to hire more engineers for its Rehovot offices courtesy of the new $2 million investment. “Our customers are distributed all over the world, not in any one location,” he says, which allows for a headquarters in Israel, perhaps the most central spot possible.

This doesn’t mean Volinskey will be able to give up his platinum cards anytime soon. But it may make booking his next ticket as easy as “Eva, get me to Redmond in time for dinner with Bill and Melinda.”