The Dutch travel tracking platform Polarsteps today announced that it has raised €900,000 in seed funding from angel investors based in the Netherlands. The app launched in April 2015 and within just two years’ time, the startup has gaine some nice traction amongst travelers. The Amsterdam-based startup plans to use the new backing to hire engineers and further develop its product.
Witch Polarsteps you can schedule your upcoming trips and the app will do its magic. It checks your location from time to time, and plots the results on a colorful map where your family and friends can follow your adventures in realtime. As you approve suggested ‘steps’ and add photos, the travel log populates itself. The app also offers a wide range of statistics, such as trip duration, countries visited and distance traveled. When your trip is finished, an instant photo album can be generated with the push of a button.
Just before heading off to a transatlantic sailing trip, Polarsteps Co-founder Niek Bokkers created a little app which enabled him to log and share his route (via satellite phone) with friends and family at home. During his trip, he got a ton of positive feedback from fellow travelers, who loved the approach of telling their travel story on a stunning map and sharing it real-time with their loved ones at home. This is why Niek and his small team decided to further develop it into an app for all travelers that helps them to automatically track and share their adventures in a nice and easy way.
Polarsteps has been in stealth mode since 2015 and raised a €500,000 funding round in March 2016, which allowed the founders to quit their jobs and start working on the platform full-time.
Koen Droste, The co-founder and CEO of Polarsteps stated: “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. 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.”
Whereas the app is currently mainly geared towards tracking your current trips, Polarsteps also wants to change how travelers discover, dream and plan their next vacation. The app mixes travel planning, tracking and remembering into one unified experience.