Wander Raises $1 Million Extension Seed Investment

Wander has announced it has raised a $1 million extension seed round, led by Arieli Capital (Tel Aviv), with participation from existing investors, including Rocky Woods Investments (Lehi) the Joan and Tim Fenton Founders Fund (Salt Lake City) that is connected with the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business. The Fenton Fund is designed to support startup companies formed by U of U business students or others within the broader University of Utah network.

"Arieli Capital identified AJ and her Wander startup during our Travel Tech innovation program in Utah," said Idan Katz, Partner & Head of Value Creation at Arieli Capital. "Recognizing Wander's potential, we invested early and continue to support the company as a key portfolio asset. Through our Value Creation program, we provide Wander with strategic guidance to maximize their growth potential. Over the past year, as Arieli's Value Creation lead, I've had the privilege of working closely with AJ and the Wander team."

Katz continued, "We began by thoroughly analysing Wander's growth vectors, which led to the development of a robust, customer-centric strategy. This strategy was then translated into a concrete execution plan, paving the way for this successful funding round. The new features Wander is introducing are truly impressive, and I have the utmost confidence in AJ and her team's ability to continue innovating in the travel tech space."

Triangle Tweener Fund (Raleigh, North Carolina) was the final investor to join the round. Founded in 2021, Triangle Tweener is a venture capital firm investing in early-stage and seed companies that are located in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. Wander's Founder and CEO, AJ Brau, is currently living in the Raleigh area and spends time both in Utah and North Carolina.

"One of the reasons I started Wander was I wanted to have a tool to help me, as a new mom, find interesting things to do with my little family" said Brau, who recently sat down with TechBuzz to describe the latest news at Wander.

She said Wander's product strategy stemmed from interviews with hundreds of travelers, including dozens of adventurous moms, much like herself. As a result, Brau identified a major gap in how people plan their experiences and how they store them—whether it be a long Europe trip, or a local outing on a Saturday night. She discovered that finding things to do from online sources, and organizing and storing them, is a huge pain point, and one that she herself frequently encountered by using social media apps.

The internet, and especially on social media platforms such as Tik Tok and Instagram, provide many things to do, but not a reliable and easy place to store them. Brau continued, "we found that a lot of moms put these places in saved folders, but they don't really ever come back to them. And when they do come back, it takes so much effort to watch the video, screenshot different things, remember the names of the different places, search for them, go and double check—it's just a really cumbersome process. So finding these things and organizing them is a huge pain point."

See our September 2022 TechBuzz News article for more information about Wander's origin story.

For the past year, Wander has been developing an AI-enabled product, Social Saving, that lets anyone, anywhere in the world, save and extract places from social media content. The wander technology automatically combines captions, OCR, metadata, captions from any content type: a URL, blog post, or YouTube video. It can also work with images with text, such as a travel brochure. The user uploads the content into the Wander app which, using Wander's AI-enhanced software, extracts the places and data and places it all on a rich, detailed map that provide the user with something to do anytime the user is near that area on the map. See further details of how it works in the video below.

The $1 million investment will enable the company to develop new features that combine travel inspiration, route-mapping, and itinerary building—all on a global basis.

"We raised much of this seed round about six months ago," said Brau, who has already been putting the funds to work on the enhanced platform features over the past few months. "A lot of the funding has been used to turn wander into a global experience without boundaries, to build a global consumer experience. That's the big thing. We'll use the funding to build out our feature set, grow our user base, and increase user engagement."

Wander's existing feature set involves highly detailed, interactive maps that are populated with data provided by destination partners, such as Discover Moab, Bryce Canyon National Park, or Bentonville Tourism Board. These partners both feed specific data into the Wander platform and ensure the accuracy of that data—an ongoing, highly dynamic process.

One of Wander's Destination Partners is Discover Moab, Moab's Tourism Board, whose lush and detailed maps are powered by Wander. The Tourism Board serves as the chief steward over all relevant "experience data" from Grand County, Utah, as Brau put it. The Board then brings in data-specific stewards to cover other areas that would be of interest to visitors to Moab, such as the National Park Service, to cover the iconic national parks in and around Moab including Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park. Another steward in that area is the Moab Chamber of Commerce that provides content to the platform about local businesses. These businesses greatly benefit from tourism. The multiple stewards over a given geographical area ensure that the Wander map is more accurate and more authoritative than competing maps. "Because you have the actual data stewards, the actual people that are managing these places on the ground, managing the data," explained Brau.

Destination partners pay Wander to use the Wander platform software to manage and embed their maps on their website. On the consumer side, Wander is rolling out a premium subscription package for users that will include enhanced features like itinerary planning, visuals, and other tools that "moms and other users can use to plan their trips and store their social media inspiration in a place that they can easily retrieve when needed," said Brau.

Brau believes that Wander's latest features, especially Social Saving, will engage users more frequently and more meaningfully than the Wander 1.0 feature set. "When you build something, you want to be able to use it every day. You want it to change your life," said Brau. "Wander hasn't done that yet, but now, with the development of these latest features, Wander can become a tool that people use every day. It's invigorating, and it's in line with what I'm doing in my personal life, growing my little family and having experiences that help us build memories together."

For more information, visit Wandermaps.com, download the Wander app with this link:

 https://wandermaps.app.link/CjW8hlKhGLb

See Wander's recent YouTube video on its latest feature, Social Saving: