Fast-growing Dutch travel blogging app Polarsteps closes €900k seed round

Polarsteps is a travel blogging app that enables a traveler to share travel memories with friends and family in real-time as the journey unfolds.  The Android and iOS apps enable you to use a smartphone and create digital memories in an interactive way. The app is currently in public beta. 

Remember journey’s

Automatic travel tracking app Polarsteps that lets people plan, track, and remember journeys raised €900k in seed capital. It previously raised €500k and €170k seed rounds in March 2016 and January 2015 respectively. Polarsteps essentially creates a ‘travel journal’ through a user’s smartphone. No need to sit down and recall which places you’ve been on your 40-day cycling trip or a weekend sojourn at a hilltop resort. The first demo of the app was travel blogging an epic motorcycle road trip from Amsterdam to Cape Town.

Today we're launching Travel Books: an instant photo album that holds your routes, stories, travel stats and photos: https://t.co/6HLSMnpSuc pic.twitter.com/RuPko5eTq7

— Polarsteps (@polarsteps) February 6, 2017

Real-time access to journals

The travel blogs are published to a website where friends and family have real-time access to the journals. The pricing of the app is based on the number of pages that a traveler publishes. Polarsteps charges €30 for publishing 24 pages and €80 for up to 300 pages. The good thing is that the app doesn’t depend on cell coverage or data roaming. You can continue taking pictures without connectivity and the app will, later on, synchronize the data after you connect to the Wi-Fi or a data network.

Word-of-mouth

Polarsteps boasts that most of its users have come from word-of-mouth. “Since we launched on Android last summer, we’ve been growing at a tremendous rate. It’s amazing to see how people from all around the world are using Polarsteps to share their passion and wanderlust”, says co-founder and CEO Koen Droste. “Our community now counts over 200,000 travelers, who have used our app in 184 countries. We’re excited to have been featured by bloggers, journalists and industry experts from all around the world, including a mentioning by Apple in their 2017 WWDC Keynote.”

Visit new places

Traveling-centric apps and communities aim to tap people who want to visit new places without having to go through the ‘nervousness’ of going to a new place. What better way to achieve it than sharing memories with the loved ones, or even joining online travel communities. MeetJune is also a cool travel startup that is an online travel community for unforgettable local experiences. The startup launched in March this year.