While a site like Kayak can help you get a clear understanding of costs when it comes to travel, other sites offering recommendation options are typically a crapshoot, littered with fabricated reviews and manipulated results that do not take into account the traveler. With such a glut of information (some accurate, some not) available, one can easily get overwhelmed. Welcome is a newly-launched app, just out of beta, that serves as a curated city and travel guide that leverages AI coupled with vetted recommendations from experts and friends to give travelers personalized recommendations that take into account preferences, weather, time of day, and a host of other factors fueled by a robust data-driven and tech-enabled approach focused on contextual place discovery. The app elegantly delivers seamless recommendations that allow users to actually enjoy their travels instead of endlessly researching for it. The app comes out of beta with over 50,000 users in 350+ cities that have provided over 300K reviews.
LA TechWatch caught up with Welcome Founder, serial entrepreneur, and CEO Matthew Rosenberg (founded and exited Cameo) to learn more about how his travels after his previous exit inspired the business, the challenges of raising funding for a travel business during a pandemic, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the total funding raised to $4.2M, and much, much more.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
$3.5M Seed Round led by Accel with participation from Lakestar Ventures.
Tell us about your product or service.
Welcome is an app that acts as your personalized city guide. It is powered by friends and experts and made smart by a real-time AI. Discover the best places from your favorite people.
Taking into account factors such as weather, time of day, user preferences, popularity, and even local holidays, Welcome makes smart, custom suggestions and curates the best places for you to go now.
From what to eat to what to do and where to play, Welcome is your personal concierge.
Welcome leverages an advanced AI proprietary parsing engine that was designed specifically to find articles, reviews, and news about a place, and combined with real-time local data, is able to surface the right places at the right time.
Welcome’s platform is built for our community which is why we’ll always highlight local businesses over chains, never sell your data, and pass on all advertising.
What inspired the start of Welcome?
Not to be a cliche, I met my now wife at Burning Man, and changed the trajectory of my life. My last startup had just been acquired, and so we put everything in storage and spent a year traveling and living wherever we wanted. Madly in love and agenda-less, we floated through European cities in search of authentic experiences. Often, instead of being in the moment, I found myself on my phone trying to find the next place – searching through endless lists and recommendations.
I dreamed of a tool that could surface the right recommendations at the right time. I wanted something that let me explore, without ever getting lost. I wanted an app that could make smart decisions in the moment, and then get out of the way.
I couldn’t find anything like that, so I decided to try and build myself. I brought the band back together with my cofounders and founding team. We have spent COVID building the data engine behind Welcome and the social fabric needed for the community to grow.
How is it different?
Through a combination of traditional web scraping and the latest advancements in machine learning, we’re able to extract data about the best places to visit from a vast range of blogs and publications.
Rather than simply displaying the data we collect, we use a range of natural language understanding algorithms and other custom machine learning models to extract a deep, contextual understanding of written content.
This allows us to determine a variety of additional data points on the places in our system without needing this data to be explicit on the sites we scrape.
For example, we can determine whether the place is a bar or a restaurant, whether it’s a great spot for a romantic night out, or whether it’s the perfect place for a rainy day.
Additionally, since we’re training our own AI systems, we can make them as specific as necessary without relying on overly general, off-the-shelf algorithms, allowing us to yield more accurate answers to our questions.
We want to be the industry leader in parsing place-related data.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
Activities, related to travel, is a $283B dollar market.
Google Maps has been estimated to be worth over $50B.
Trip Advisor has a market cap of over $4.6B.
What’s your business model?
Welcome is focused on two business use cases:
1. Integrating with a wide range of outside APIs and datasets to act as a concierge in your pocket, making purchases and reservations in the moment automatically.
Imagine you are with a friend looking for some food – Welcome can make a smart recommendation not only based on local data and personal preferences but also reservation data. Welcome finds you a place that’s great, close, and can seat you now. Welcome then orders an Uber for you, arriving just as you walk out the door. As you eat, Welcome is looking for real-time events around you, suggesting a concert. Tickets are purchased automatically, ready for you to show at the entrance.
2. Acting as a marketplace for premium publishers
Welcome’s data engine is designed to parse datasets from anywhere. Working with legacy travel guide publishers, Welcome can instantly parse and digest their information creating premium purchase opportunities on our platform.
This would allow anyone who has ever created a travel guide to seemly transfer to our digital platform without any work. Users benefit from having access to multiple guides on one single map.
What are your post-COVID office plans??
All meetings done on the beach at sunrise.
What was the funding process like?
Fundraising is a brutal process that is painful for even the strongest founders. When the documents are closed, you suddenly forget all about the pain, and everyone considers you great at fundraising. Then many months later, you repeat the whole process. It could be considered a form of insanity.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Consumer with a travel focus is a notoriously hard sector to raise money in.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
We shared a consumer-first sentiment, combined with a shared understanding of the problem.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We are really focusing on the social side of Welcome. A lot of our time has been spent on the data engine behind Welcome, so we are excited to focus on the user experience and social aspects.
What advice can you offer companies in Los Angeles that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Hang in there. It’s a cruel system.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
- Continuing to build out advanced features like reservations, delivery options, and ticketing.
- Building out some really exciting social features.
- Android App
What’s your favorite outdoor activity in LA?
Sunset beach swim in Malibu.
