About
Why we built it
Elena spent eight years building consumer travel products. She watched people open forty browser tabs, read a hundred reviews, spend entire evenings just trying to figure out whether to go to the museum on Day 2 or Day 4, and eventually book something generic because the planning was exhausting. Good trips were being abandoned before they started.
The information was never the bottleneck. There are more recommendations than anyone can process. The problem was turning a pile of options into a plan: one that fits your days, your pace, and what you actually like. Every tool left that work to you.
Devin had spent ten years building recommendation and ranking models. The question that started the company was simple: how hard is it to take a person's actual preferences and make a good day-by-day plan that follows the rules a good trip follows? Walkable days. Honest notes. A plan that adapts when you change your mind.
Designing a paced, personalized itinerary from a few fuzzy preferences is a genuine language-model task. It is the core of Wander, not a bolt-on. The model is not a search box with extra words. It is the planner.
The team
Five of them are below. Everyone is based in the United States. Wander is what we do.
Co-founder and CEO
Denver, CO
Spent eight years building consumer travel products, most recently leading planning at a booking company where she watched people abandon a good trip because the planning was exhausting. Wander is the plan she wished the tools had made for her.
Co-founder and CTO
Denver, CO
Ten years in applied machine learning on ranking and recommendation, most recently turning messy human preferences into ordered results at scale. He owns the planning model, the pacing logic and the evaluation set every itinerary change is measured against.
Head of Product
Denver, CO
Designs the new-trip flow and the itinerary screen, which is the whole product. Her rule: someone should feel the shape of their trip within a few seconds of the plan appearing, without reading a wall of text.
Founding Engineer
Austin, TX
Works on the parts nobody sees: keeping days walkable, catching a plan that sends you across a city and back, and making the model's plan reproducible enough to trust. He owns the pacing and clustering engine.
Head of Travel Editorial
Brooklyn, NY
A former guidebook editor who writes the honesty into Wander. Her rule: every worth-it note has to earn it, and a skip has to say why, because a plan you cannot trust is worse than no plan at all.
The people and investors named on this page are illustrative. Wander is a Pre-Seed company and we would rather say so plainly than have you find out later. The product is real: the planning engine, honest notes and the free tier work as described.
How we work
A day that looks good on paper but sends you across the city and back is worse than a plainer day that flows. Every change is measured against real trips with known-good shapes before it ships.
If we cannot say skip, the worth-it means nothing. Every stop's note has to earn it, and a skip has to say why. A plan that will not tell you what to skip is not being kind. It is being useless.
Planning a trip is our job. Confirming the details before you rely on them is yours. We say so plainly on every itinerary, because the honest thing is to say so and the dishonest thing is to imply otherwise.
11 people, none of us here part time. You own an area, talk to users in your first two weeks, and see what you built reach people before the next sprint does.
The company
Backed by
We raised $850,000 at Pre-Seed in January 2024, led by Farsight Ventures. The funding goes into the planning engine and the product, not advertising them.
Farsight Ventures
Lead investor, Pre-Seed
An early-stage fund that backs consumer software with a real product wedge.
Marisol Reyes
Angel
Former head of product at a large travel marketplace.
Theo Whitaker
Angel
Founded and sold a maps and local-discovery app.