Startup Stage: Soar is looking to automate trip management

Soar

Soar's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered travel assistant connects to email and automatically identifies travel details to build a traveler profile. Soar communicates over iMessage, including group chats, to check in for flights, make changes and provide in-trip support. 

Following a year in beta, New York-based Soar launched in 2026 and plans to eventually pursue an initial public offering (IPO).

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Soar is a proactive travel companion. It reads your inbox to learn exactly how you travel, then texts you to book and manage every trip: check-ins, visas, last minute stays. [It’s] like a great human travel agent who's known you your whole life.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Technology: Soar securely connects to your inbox and builds a traveler profile from every booking and preference, past and future. That profile lets Soar act proactively: auto check-ins to flights, visa guidance, rebooking and in-trip support, all over iMessage, including in any group chat. The iOS app drives product-led growth through shareability and iOS-native features like Live Activities and gives travelers a place to access deeper utility.

Business: We earn a take rate on accommodation bookings today, with an annual subscription for power users launching later this year. We also operate an agent marketplace as a near pure-margin top of the funnel channel.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths: All-organic acquisition and a community of 10,000+ travelers. Traveler profiles built from inbox context that get more personal the longer you use Soar.

Weaknesses: iOS and iMessage first. A deliberate depth-over-breadth bet, but it caps near-term reach on Android and abroad.

Opportunities: AI is handing people back their time, and travel is where they'll spend it. Gen Z plans trips in group chats and has no loyalty to legacy OTAs. Nobody owns the messaging surface for travel, and we fully intend to.

Threats: Big LLMs pushing into travel. For a generalist, travel will always be a side feature. They won't build supply relationships, booking infrastructure or in-trip support, and they can't sit in the group chat. We win by going deep in the vertical.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspectives?

For the traveler: Every part of travel still runs on their own time and labor. Researching, booking, monitoring and recovering from disruptions all fall on the traveler, because the one thing that fixes it, a dedicated human handling everything, has never existed at scale.

For the industry: The OTA era traded personalization for reach. Suppliers pay heavy commissions for anonymous, one-off demand with no relationship attached, then carry the cost of support and disruption recovery for travelers they don’t know much about.

Now that the product is built, what's your strategy for customer acquisition?

Acquisition started before the product existed. We built a travel community on social media averaging 1 million+ monthly views through founder-led content, and some of the largest travel creators have organically become champions, including our ‘Explorer in Residence,’ Sophia Lee, who is on track to become the youngest person to visit all 195 countries. Phase one stays organic through community, creators and distribution through iMessage.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

Need was established the unglamorous way: relentless user testing and shipping what our beta community asked for, week after week, before we ever opened to the public. Travelers connected their inboxes, booked stays and added Soar to friend group chats without being asked. More than 10,000 travelers and over 100,000 trips with no paid acquisition is our proof of need.

On market: We don't lead with the trillion-dollar travel number because everyone reading this knows it. Our beachhead is accommodations, a segment measured in hundreds of billions in annual gross bookings. From there, we will extend into flights, experiences and every other booking category, with subscription revenue layered on top for frequent travelers.

How and when will you make money?

We already do. Take rate on accommodation bookings today, an annual subscription for power users launching later this year. We also control an agent marketplace as a pure top of the funnel distribution channel, which generates revenue for us on its own.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Stanley Virgint (founder and CEO) moved to China at 17 to build DJI's first American engineering team, scaled consumer apps from seed through Series B, has traveled to 75+ countries and left Cornell's AI/ML program to build Soar full time. The product is what he wished existed for the last decade of his own travel.

Joining Stanley: Alex Szczurek, founding designer, an ex-founder who ran a $1 million ARR design studio and was founding designer at Abode; Sophia Lee, Explorer in Residence, travel creator and youngest person to visit every country, with 200,000+ followers and 100 million+ views this year; and Rosie Atkins, leading growth, scaled multiple eight-figure DTC brands and expert in consumer branding and marketing.

Advisors include Ron Schneidermann, former CEO of AllTrails, and Andy Acs, founder of @hotel.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

We're a small, globally distributed team, and we hire directly from the community we serve, which spans travelers of every background across dozens of countries. That's not incidental to the mission. Personalized, proactive travel management has historically been reserved for the wealthy. Democratizing it is the entire point of the company, and building it well requires a team and community that actually reflect the travelers we're building for.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Holding conviction in a category that has burned a generation of investors. The temptation to reshape the company into something easier to fund takes conviction. We keep shipping for our travelers and let the product and market timing carry the rest.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact. Why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

Luck won't be the mechanism. Incumbents are structurally unprepared for the AI age, and AI-native products are our bread and butter. The people who built the modern travel industry agree: Our advisors and backers include the former CEOs of Expedia and AllTrails. The people who won the last era are betting on us to win this one.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

Closing our Series A with hundreds of thousands of travelers relying on Soar weekly, subscription revenue live and accommodations proven as the first of several booking categories.

What is your endgame? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

IPO. Travel deserves an independent, category-defining company built for this era, not a feature absorbed into someone else's platform.