Finnish startup Reveel announced it has secured 650k in a pre-seed round from Inventure VC as well as top-tier angel investors from Finland. The Reveel platform allows any actors in the tourism sector, from museums to cities, to easily turn their paper maps and info boards into smart, digital guidebooks that open up directly in the visitors’ phones, allowing for an easy transition towards smart, sustainable and personalized visitor experiences. Ultimately, the goal is a must-have platform solution for destinations across the globe.
Founded in 2021 by Sebastian Mellblom, Robin Kanerva, Fredrik Fazer and William Helmenius, the Finnish startup already has notable partnerships including Viking Line, the UNESCO site Suomenlinna, and the City of Estepona.
“We couldn’t be happier with having such a great group of investors on board. This journey will not only require a great product but also a great team and support system, and we truly feel like we’ve gotten just that. This funding round allows us to accelerate our mission towards truly smart tourism, as well as build the team of rockstars required to make Reveel a household name within visitor experiences,” said Sebastian Mellblom, Co-Founder and CEO of Reveel.
The platform uses AI to translate all content directly into 28 different languages, allowing for travelers from across the globe to discover in their own languages. Destinations can also create digital guided tours through the platform, where the app navigates the visitor through the destination, and at each point of interest, the guide’s voice starts playing automatically. This gives partners a new dimension to their visitor experiences, and instead of building expensive and time-consuming solutions of their own, destinations can join the Reveel platform instantly.
Reveel provides the partner with the tools to manage, maintain and update the content at the destination without a hassle, allowing for a more up-to-date experience for the visitor. The platform also allows destinations to create new sources of income and thus monetize previously idle assets, for example in the form of digital guided tours that can be purchased straight from the visitors’ smartphones. Reveel is also in the process of launching entrance ticket services, allowing destinations to outsource this part of the business to an all-in-one solution for their visitors.
In 2021, co-founders Sebastian Mellblom and Robin Kanerva realized that the on-site experience was outdated – we still get paper maps at destinations, we read information from physical displays and we use outdated audio devices with disposable headphones at historical sites. Not only is this excessively unsustainable, but it also lacks interactivity and the possibility to discover in a personalized manner.
Upon further research, it became clear that there was a lack of a generalized solution that could work in multiple destinations, and the only alternative to modernising these outdated solutions was to build expensive and time-consuming solutions that work only at that particular site, which also tend to become outdated over time.
This displayed another issue: travelers don’t want to learn to use a new solution at each site they visit. The solution was to build a platform that can be incorporated instantly, taking away the stress for destinations of designing solutions themselves. Reveel focuses on the technology, the destination focuses on the content. Through platform thinking, destinations now also get access to continuous product improvements without having to take on a new project each time something needs to be updated.
