Tell us about Polarsteps
Polarsteps is the market-leading travel app that helps over 13 million travellers worldwide to plan, track, and relive their adventures in a beautiful and seamless way.
What do you think makes Polarsteps unique in travel tech?
There are many travel startups that try to solve just one problem that people encounter while travelling, which leads to a fragmented experience for travellers. We’re trying to solve this by becoming an all-in-one travel app, where travellers can go to get inspired before their trip, plan their adventures, track their travels and share stories from the road with loved ones back home, then get to relive their trips in a beautiful way upon their return. We’re on a mission to build the essential tool for modern-day explorers — before, during, and after their trips.
What is it like to build something that’s human in the face of all the AI startups?
It’s all about harnessing the power of AI but ensuring the human element remains — so we’re working with LLMs to help our users reflect on their journeys and plan future ones, but we have a team of expert travel editors, who are crucial in this process. AI has a lot of power in helping us manage and get value from large datasets, but the insights of human experts, their ability to manage nuance, different ethical considerations and cultural sensitivity is so critical in creating a positive experience for travellers and local communities.
What is your advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?
Choose to be around people in your team who inspire you and make you laugh. Startup and scaleup journeys can be tough at times, and being around people who are fun and kind and funny and from whom you can learn makes all the difference.
What most excites you about Polarsteps?
I think it’s the sheer scale of what this could be. Polarsteps has already been used to track trips in every country in the world, and a few years ago, over 3 billion miles were tracked with Polarsteps in just one year. That’s the equivalent of going to Mars and back 10 times!
And now the user growth has just absolutely taken off internationally. I’m so excited for people outside of Europe to discover it and fall in love with it as we have here. Polarsteps is building an incredible community of travellers, and seeing the consumer numbers explode makes me so excited for the next few years as we’ll see it grow, get even more diverse and be a part of hundreds of millions more adventures.
How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
We’ve been leading the way in people using Polarsteps to track their trips and share with friends and family for a while now — but recently we’ve seen mass growth in people planning their trips with us, too. We’ve also now reached 60 team members, as we’ve been able to grow our revenue significantly along with our user growth, allowing us to grow the company radically in the last couple of years without needing outside capital.
What can we hope to see from Polarsteps in the future?
Lots of growth outside of Europe! And with this comes an even bigger set of trips shared with the community — people can get inspired by each other’s trips, get even more insider tips and travel in ways that suit them; an example of this is that we’re seeing more and more slow travel / sustainable journeying on Polarsteps as this becomes a bigger trend in travel.
