Startup Stage: Drifter targets AI discovery gap with visibility platform for destinations

Drifter AI

Drifter provides AI visibility analytics for destinations, helping places understand how they appear across platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. 

Its platform enables destination marketing organizations (DMOs), hotels and attractions to monitor, measure and improve how they are represented in AI-driven travel discovery.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

AI is fast becoming the interface for travel discovery, and most places have no idea how they show up in it. Hotels, attractions, tour operators destinations. They spent twenty years perfecting SEO, but almost none of that transfers to how AI recommends. Drifter is the AI visibility infrastructure for places. Our product, Currents, runs real traveler queries against ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, then analyzes whether a place gets mentioned, what sources AI cites and how it stacks up against competitors. We start with DMOs because they control destination narrative and unlock entire local ecosystems. One DMO relationship opens the door to every hotel, attraction and operator in their region.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Business: Drifter is B2B SaaS for the place economy, starting with destination marketing organizations as our wedge. Any place-based business can run a free AI visibility snapshot to see how they perform across the major AI platforms. That snapshot tends to surface uncomfortable gaps no one knew existed, which drives conversion to paid annual monitoring tiers starting at $4,999 per year. DMOs are phase one because they sit at the top of local travel ecosystems, and when they adopt, the hotels, attractions and operators underneath follow. We also built Dock, an embeddable on-domain AI layer that lets places offer intelligent trip discovery directly on their websites while capturing real traveler intent data that feeds back into Currents.

Technology: Every Currents report generates a custom query plan tailored to the destination, organized into four features. Aspirational Discovery tests broad organic visibility with blind queries scoped to a wide geofence ("best romantic getaways in the Pacific Northwest"). Realistic Discovery tests competitive visibility with blind queries scoped to a tight geofence matching the destination's actual competitive region. Peer Validation runs named comparison queries against known competitors. And Sentiment probes how AI perceives the destination's reputation on themes like safety, value and family-friendliness.

We built a taxonomy of 14 entity archetypes across 5 clusters (destination management, lodging, activities, business and transit, lifestyle) and 10 intent families spanning discovery and validation phases. A beach resort gets fundamentally different queries than a convention center. None of this is one-size-fits-all.

The system calculates two core metrics: Answer Share (the percentage of blind queries where the destination was mentioned organically) and Authority Share (which sources AI cites when discussing the destination). Where destinations are weak, we generate content briefs built on what actually gets cited. A non-technical marketer can open one, copy it, publish it, done.

Queries run across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for cross-platform intelligence.

Give us your SWOT analysis of the company.

Strengths: First mover in AI visibility built specifically for places. Deep domain expertise from over a year of direct conversations with DMOs and presence at major industry conferences, including [The Phocuswright Conference 2025], where we demoed the vision to national-level tourism boards, with strong interest. Highly capital-efficient with strong gross margins on paid tiers. Our dual-product architecture (Currents for visibility, Dock for on-domain engagement) creates a data flywheel where real traveler queries sharpen our visibility models.

Weaknesses: Brand recognition is still early in a market where travel businesses tend to stick with established vendor relationships.

Opportunities: Over 40% of travelers now use AI for trip research, and no one has built the visibility layer for the businesses that depend on being discovered. Profound just raised $96 million at a billion-dollar valuation ($155 million total) building horizontal AI visibility for consumer brands like Target and Walmart, validating the category. We're building the vertical version for places. The GEO market is projected at $7.3 billion by 2031. Globally, places spend over $75 billion annually on their own discovery and marketing.

Threats: Horizontal AI visibility players like Profound could eventually add a travel vertical, though place discovery is fundamentally different from brand monitoring (14 entity archetypes, geofencing, journey-phase awareness). SEO incumbents like Semrush, BrightEdge, and Conductor have shipped AI visibility features but lack destination-specific intelligence. DMO tech incumbents like Simpleview and Sojern have added AI chatbots but no AI visibility monitoring. DMO budget cycles are long, meaning sales timelines can stretch.

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

For places: When someone asks ChatGPT "best wine country for a first trip with friends who like hiking," most destinations, hotels and tour operators have no idea whether they show up in the answer. The same is true when a traveler asks for "best venue for a corporate retreat in Scottsdale" or "boutique hotels near Napa with vineyard views." SEO is one-dimensional: you rank for a keyword or you don't. AI is far more complex. It factors in traveler context, intent, journey phase, seasonal relevance entity type. Places of all kinds are flying blind in the channel that is increasingly replacing traditional search, and they have no playbook for fixing it. Currents is that playbook.

For the industry: AI recommendations synthesize across sources in ways most travel businesses have not optimized for. This creates a widening gap between places that happen to be well-represented in AI training data and those that aren't. Without visibility tools built for travel, AI recommendations will calcify around the same well-known names, making it harder for independent hotels, emerging destinations and specialized operators to break through. That is bad for travelers and bad for the industry.

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

The free AI visibility snapshot is the engine. Any DMO, hotel group, or attraction can run one to see how they perform across the major AI platforms, who their AI competitors are and where the gaps live. It costs us almost nothing to generate and the data is surprising enough that it gets shared internally, which drives organic expansion within organizations.

Phase one is DMOs. We've been nurturing relationships for over a year both online and at conferences. We demoed the vision at [The Phocuswright Conference 2025] and have been getting three to five enterprise demo requests per week since launching Currents in January. Over 50 warm DMO relationships in the pipeline spanning the U.S. and Europe.

From there, we scale in two directions: horizontally through DMO trade channels like Destinations International and agency partnerships, and vertically by expanding into the hotels, attractions, and operators that sit inside each DMO's ecosystem. The DMO relationship is the distribution channel into the broader place economy.

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

I spent May to October 2025 selling an embeddable AI product to DMOs. Lukewarm responses after dozens of conversations. But I started reading between the lines. What kept surfacing was a deeper anxiety: they had almost no visibility into how AI systems were representing their destinations, and no clear idea what to do about it.

We came into [The Phocuswright Conference] in November with the AI visibility idea already forming. Instead of pitching, I spent every conversation asking questions and listening. The product is shaped around pain they described but didn't know the solution to. After eight years building B2B SaaS, it was the first time the idea came from customers, not assumptions.

Validation runs deep. Profound raised $155M (including a recent $96M Series C at a $1B valuation) building horizontal AI visibility for consumer brands, proving the category is real and fundable. Every DMO we've shown data to has been genuinely interested in what they saw. And more than 50 DMO relationships were nurtured through that process.

On market sizing: roughly 2,500 functional DMOs in the U.S. and about 6,000 globally. But DMOs are the wedge. The place economy is massive. Hotels alone spend $15 to $30B annually on discovery and marketing. The GEO market is projected at $7.3B by 2031. We're building the AI visibility layer for all of it.

How and when will you make money?

The free snapshot launched January 2026. Paid tiers are going live now on annual contracts. Currents Growth starts at $4,999 per year. Pro runs $8,999 per year. Enterprise pricing for agencies and national and state-level DMOs managing multiple destinations.

Once a DMO is on Currents, Dock becomes the natural cross-sell. They go from monitoring their AI visibility to actively shaping it with an on-domain AI layer that captures traveler intent data and feeds it back into their Currents dashboard. Monitoring plus engagement on a single platform.

But the bigger play is using DMOs as the wedge into the broader place economy. A DMO sits on top of hundreds of local businesses: hotels, attractions, convention venues. When a DMO sees which of those businesses are underrepresented in AI, the natural next step is recommending our tools. "This is what we use" is a high-trust referral. Fifty DMOs gives us warm access to 15,000+ places. Even modest conversion from that ecosystem changes the revenue picture dramatically.

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

Our founding team spent eight years building and scaling B2B SaaS products. Took our last company to $1.5 million ARR. We designed and built the entire Drifter platform, from the query architecture and AI sampling infrastructure down to the dashboards. What pulled us into this space was a personal obsession with travel and a frustration with how algorithmic recommendations were flattening the experience and how the noise of social media and AI could disproportionately drown out the hidden gems. We started Drifter to solve a traveler problem. Working closely with DMOs for months revealed a bigger, more urgent one on the institutional side: destinations losing control of their narrative as discovery shifts to AI. So we built for that instead.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

We hire on merit. Our small team happens to span multiple countries, but that's a byproduct of finding the best people, not fitting a narrative.

Where diversity genuinely matters to us is in the product. AI systems have a well-documented bias toward well-known, heavily-documented destinations. That means smaller communities, culturally distinctive places and destinations outside the mainstream Western travel circuit get systematically underrepresented. Currents is designed to make that visible. Our pricing and tier system are intentionally structured so micro and small destinations can access the same tools as the big players. If we do our job right, AI gets better at representing the full range of places worth visiting, not just the obvious ones.

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

Letting go of the obvious product to build the right one. I spent months building an embeddable AI-powered planning experience that DMOs genuinely loved putting on their websites. But through dozens of conversations with destination marketers, I realized the existential problem was not on the traveler side. It was that destinations were going invisible in the AI-driven discovery layer replacing traditional search. Pivoting to lead with AI visibility infrastructure meant repositioning the company and accepting that the product I'd built with conviction was the supporting act, not the headline. That strategic clarity has to come from your own judgment and customer conversations. There is no co-founder to push back on you or validate you. The weight of that decision was real. But the market response confirmed it was right.

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

We are not building a consumer travel app. Drifter sells to institutions, not consumers. DMOs, hotel groups and venues all have dedicated marketing budgets and buy software through predictable procurement cycles. They also face a new problem their existing vendors do not solve. No one in the travel technology ecosystem offers AI visibility intelligence built for places. Not Simpleview. Not Zartico. Not the SEO tools. We are creating a category, not fighting for share in one.

The timing also matters. Profound just hit a billion-dollar valuation proving AI visibility is a real, fundable category. We are building the vertical version for the largest class of businesses that depend on discovery: places. That is not a feature. It is a platform shift.

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

Fifty-plus paying customers anchored by DMOs across the U.S. and Europe, meaningful recurring revenue and hundreds of places having run the free snapshot. Drifter will be the definitive source of data on how AI represents the travel industry.

More importantly, we will have started proving the expansion thesis by signing our first non-DMO accounts and demonstrating that AI visibility is a horizontal problem across the entire place economy.

What is your endgame?

Build the AI visibility layer for the place economy and grow. Any place-based business that depends on being discovered will need to understand how AI represents them. That is a massive, enduring market.

We would consider a strategic acquisition if it accelerated the mission rather than shelving the product. But the preference is to build a category-defining company. The place economy is large enough to support that.