Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2024: Unravel

Unravel

Headquarters: London

CEO: Vijay Anand

Website: Unravelapp

Founding date: 2021

Investment: $2.1 million

Unravel is a shoppable video feed of the world's most instagrammable experiences - an “embedded travel” platform that combines the serendipitous discovery of TikTok with the utility of Expedia. As part of our B2B2C distribution strategy, brands can white label Unravel into their digital assets to engage a generation brought-up on an infinite scroll of viral feed.

Strategic goals for 2024

Our platform today helps 20 million-plus customers of our clients discover and book their dream vacation in minutes. We want to scale this to 100 million customers by 2024. This will help us optimize our platform for conversion and double our current industry-leading engagement and conversion rates. Unravel’s state of the art AI is already great at hyper personalizing the feed and funnel, thanks to our core team of AI engineers who have designed recommendation engines for top content and financial brands. We’re now adding GenAI smarts at every stage of the purchase journey to further improve conversion for our clients and drive great RoI on their marketing spends.

Lessons learned since founding

Content quality is non-negotiable: It’s not just about showcasing the destination. The content must be compelling and immersive which make the user feel that “it could be them enjoying this life enriching experience.”

Personalization is key: Travel is a highly personal experience, and the platform should be able to adapt to every taste and budget. Implementing robust personalization algorithms that consider user preferences, browsing history, and inferred budget often leads to improved engagement metrics. We’ve seen how every improvement in our algorithms has led to an improvement in both retention and conversion.

Global expansion requires local insights: People travel differently in every region and understanding local cultures, preferences and regulations is crucial to working with top local brands. We tailor our platform’s content and personalization in a way that allows our brand partner to celebrate local culture even more.