Off Track Planet Raises $500,000 To Build Living Travel Guide

Off Track Planet app

Off Track Planet started as a Brooklyn-based travel blog in 2009. Their first book Off Track Planet’s Travel Guide for the Young, Sexy, and Broke was released in 2012 and saw impressive distribution, including at Urban Outfitters stores. That year they also moved half of their startup to Cincinnati to participate in the Brandery.

Now, the hits just keep coming. Last week Off Track Planet announced a $500,000 seed round. CincyTech, the Brandery, and unnamed international angels all participated in the round. Off Track Planet will use their new capital infusion to build the world’s first “living travel guide.” The new app (which is currently in private beta) will aggregate users’ content from across all their social networks, organizing it by date, location, tags, and keywords into a single timeline. From that stream of images and updates, OTP will curate and add some editorial to create a cohesive, branded guide for a given place. Users will be incentivized to add more and better detail to create the richest guides possible. The “living” part comes in because each guide will change and grow as users contribute more and more content. Off Track Planet co-founder and CEO Freddy Pikovsky said in a statement:

“In order to build the most beautiful and intelligent travel guide, we needed to make it insanely easy and richer for people to share their experiences. Your travel stuff is scattered all over the place. We have pictures and bits of content fragmented on different social sites (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc), and there’s no easy way of putting it all together to tell your story.”

The app is currently in private beta while the company recruits “super-users,” meaning travel experts, local experts, photographers, and bloggers. The company plans to launch a public beta early next year, along with 3 city guides: Buenos Aires, Brooklyn, and Berlin. Off Track Planet is demo-ing the new app at two separate events tonight. Go here to sign up for the Cincinnati event and here for the Brooklyn event. You can also keep up with beta release on the Off Track Planet website.

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