Company: Polarsteps
Co-Founders: Clare Jones, Maximiliana Neustadt, Koen Droste, Job Harmsen
Website: https://www.polarsteps.com/
About Polarsteps
Polarsteps was born in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. One of our founders built the first version of the app to automatically track his route while sailing across the ocean, so he could share the journey with friends and family back home. So many travellers were excited about what he built that the founders decided to create an all-in-one travel app. Polarsteps was launched in 2015 and is now helping 22+ million travellers worldwide to plan, track and relive their adventures.
The journey hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Polarsteps operates in an industry that was brought almost completely to a standstill during Covid. Founder Koen Droste, CEO at the time, successfully led the company through this challenging period, but ended up severely burned out. CTO and cofounder Maximiliano Neustadt took up the mantle as CEO for the final years of the pandemic, then together the founders decided to bring in an outside CEO for the next period of growth: Clare Jones. She’s helped Polarsteps to grow internationally and profitably, with an Amsterdam-based, talent-dense team of 100 people.
Travel today is fragmented: inspiration lives on social media, planning in spreadsheets and LLMs, bookings across multiple sites and memories end up collecting dust in camera rolls. At Polarsteps, our mission is to bring it all together and be the essential tool for modern-day explorers before, during and after their trips
Features core to our app include truly personalised travel inspiration, an interactive trip planner, automatic route tracking (making it incredibly easy to share travel stories with friends and family back home) and beautiful ways to relive the journey after it’s finished, with auto-generated trip videos and premium printed Travel Books.
What truly sets Polarsteps apart in the SaaS ecosystem is our model and mindset. The app is completely ad-free and privacy-forward: we don’t monetise attention or user data. We generate revenue through high-quality Travel Book sales, a subscription and carefully selected affiliate partnerships. This has made us profitable and independent, allowing us to focus on long-term product excellence. Design and user experience are at the core of everything we do. Our map-centric approach has resulted in immense user love, with our growth happening largely through word of mouth and exceptional long-term retention.
In a crowded market of single-purpose tools and ad-driven apps, Polarsteps stands out by being a true all-in-one travel app that’s profitable without ads and relentlessly user-centric.
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