I’m Saleem.
I build Unravel Travel within my community, from a travel lab in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.
Qualicum Beach, BC → Montreal · 3,700 km, 40,000 WestJet points.
⬆️ 2 hours north of Victoria · ➡️ 2 hours east of Tofino · 🧓 Canada’s most elderly population.
1999
“Webmaster”
Started in web design with a real eye for product. Built an affiliate site that funded a trip to Costa Rica.
2007
Digital Nomad Era
Self-taught full-stack developer and marketer, building apps from the road. A year across Australia by rail.
2013
Fintech growth
Paid growth lead at Bench Accounting (Seed → A) and Clio (Series C → D).
Today
Running an open product lab, building with AI across design, development, and marketing. Pickleball fanatic.
Oct ’26
Media Hit
Front-page feature in Neighbours of Qualicum Beach Magazine.
From card to claim. Meet Rova.
Think Lonely Planet in your pocket, but personal, live, and collaborative. Rova plans the trip with you, comes with you, gets you home, and helps you plan the next one.
Rova turns points into trips beyond your dreams.
Rova curates the trip in collaboration with you, your advisor, or both.
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Credit card matchmaking
AI-powered matching based on your spending habits and travel goals, pairing you with the best card for what you need and where you want to go, across 75+ card pages.
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Points redemption strategies
Spend directly or transfer to a partner? Rova shows what your points are actually worth and the smartest way to use them, backed by reward-value guides, how-to guides, and worked case studies.
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A guidebook written and narrated just for you
Personalized itineraries built around your plans and taste, your destination, and your redemption strategy, with an optional narrated audio guide. Made for print and mobile phones, works anywhere, interactive, live updating.
Rova makes the call.
Know your rights, know what to say, and let Rova handle the airline.
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Live intelligence
Inbound aircraft tracking and cancellation odds, plus why it happened: airline's fault or not, determines your compensation. Rova then tells you what to ask for, what to document, and surfaces the next available flights.
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Rova calls the airline
Say the word and Rova dials the airline, holds your place in line, and patches you in when an agent picks up. Every call recorded and transcribed for your file, to get you a good resolution from the airline.
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Your guidebook keeps up
The new flight flows straight into your personalized itinerary, and every downstream transfer, check-in, and connection shifts to match.
Rova follows up. And keeps planning.
Rova gets you ready for your next trip.
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Rova digs deep
Rova keeps investigating after you land, tracing tail-number swaps that can flip a delay from weather to airline fault, and unlock cash. Its model reads 50,000+ CTA decisions to know what gets paid.
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Letters and escalation
Built as the disruption happens: duration, cause, and airline-controlled status, logged at the source. When you're ready, an APPR letter is generated and pre-filled.
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Into the next guidebook
Any payout or voucher lands as credit on a fresh personalized itinerary, so your next guidebook is already building while this claim finishes.
Three revenue streams.
A recurring membership at the core, with affiliate and claims revenue we earn alongside it.
Consumer
Membership
Personalized Travel Guidebooks, point alerts for best redemption, upgrade strategies, and lounge access.
Affiliate
Card referral revenue
Earned from the wallet work we do on card pages. Approved cards pay roughly $30 to $120 each, premium travel cards at the top.
Claims
Share of successful claims
A no-win-no-fee contingency on each successful claim. Claims tooling is on the roadmap.
What's live today.
The doors are open. Product is in active development. We're mindful of privacy and data storage, especially with LLMs in the loop.
What we're raising, and what it buys.
This raise is about discovering our acquisition metrics and proving paid can scale.
Product & Operations
AI-assisted Custom travel guidebooks, Credit Card Matching, Real-time flight intelligence, and Live guidance, plus day-to-day operations. The unified data layer that connects it all, with privacy and consent built in from the start.
PR, SEO & Google Ads
Earned media, organic search, and local and traditional channels, plus Google Ads capturing travellers at the moment of intent. The compounding top of the funnel and the highest-intent pull demand there is.
Hires
The founding team beyond the founder: a partnerships and operations lead to run deals, APPR claims, and day-to-day operations, and a social and sales lead to run content, community, and member conversion.
Scaling
Paid acquisition at scale across search, social, and lookalike audiences built on first-party conversion data, putting the fully built platform in front of more travellers as CAC falls.
Investment
$450K–$1M · $6M cap, scaling with raise size post-money SAFE
Boarding
Now
Runway
18 months to seed-ready
Investor copy
Investment
$450K–$1M
unraveltravel.world
Appendix.
Booked, boarded,
and cash back.
One guide for the whole trip: before it starts, while it's happening, and if it goes wrong.
Points, rights, claims.
More points earned, more rights owed, and less of both captured every year.
Before you leave
16%
of Canadians feel they're getting good value from their rewards. The average wallet now spans 13+ loyalty programs, each with its own rules.
Every devaluation quietly widens the gap between points earned and value captured.
When things go wrong
1 in 5
can say what they're owed when a flight is delayed or cancelled. 80% of disrupted travellers never file a claim at all.
And disruptions keep climbing past pre-pandemic peaks, with more flights every year.
After you land
3 years
is the average wait on 97,000+ unresolved passenger claims. Most people give up long before a decision comes.
But the rules just moved in travellers' favour, right as claim volumes hit record highs.
Sources: 2025 Bond Loyalty Report (Canada) · AirHelp 2025 Passenger Rights Survey · CTA backlog via CBC, March 2026 · Courtready, Sept 2025 · Transport Canada 2026
Big market. Widening gap.
More Canadians carry travel cards, and fly, than ever before.
The wallets
9 in 10
Canadian adults carry a credit card, roughly 31M people.
The travellers
58M+
screened at Canada's 8 largest airports in 2025, part of the 5B passengers flown worldwide that year.
The APPR backlog
126,000
complaints projected by 2028, the CTA's own forecast as filings keep climbing.
Sources: Canadian Bankers Association, 2025 · Bond Loyalty Report 2026 · Statistics Canada / CATSA, Feb 2026 · Transport Canada 2026 · IATA, 2025 · TravelPulse Canada, June 2025
Addressable market: global to near-term
Global opportunity · TAM
$52B
The worldwide travel-loyalty market. Canada is the beachhead; the model travels.
Serviceable market · SAM
$4B
Canadian adults who hold a travel-rewards card and fly.
Obtainable market today · SOM
$1.0–1.7B
Canadian adults 40+ who fly internationally and hold a travel-rewards card. The segment we serve first.
Sources: Global Industry Analysts, 2025 · Gartner · IATA · Canadian Bankers Association · Bond Loyalty Report 2026 · internal estimates (SAM/SOM sizing, $673 blended fee)
We cover the whole trip, and back again.
The moat compounds: each member sharpens targeting and lowers the cost of the next.
| Pre-trip | Mid-trip | Post-trip | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unravel Travel | Teaches points and cards, guides the trip, alerts you to delays, and helps claim what you’re owed | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Wallet Building | Credit Card Genius, FinlyWealth, Ratehub, NerdWallet, MaxRewards, Prince of Travel, Points.com, Point.me, Juicy Miles, 10xTravel | ✓ | – | – |
| Trip Building | TripIt, Wanderlog, Roadtrippers, Inspirock, Google Travel | ✓ | – | – |
| Flight Alerts | Flighty, App in the Air, TripIt Pro, FlightAware, airline SMS/text alerts | – | ✓ | – |
| Claim-only services | AirHelp, AirAdvisor, Flightright, Compensair | – | – | ✓ |
The moat · built to widen with every member
1 Public data, proprietary edge
We analyzed 50,000+ published CTA decisions to find exactly what tips a claim from denied to paid. Rova's classification model is built on that pattern, and every disruption it tracks adds new first-party data on top.
Source: Canadian Transportation Agency published decisions, analyzed internally.
2 Acquisition that compounds
Every converted member feeds lookalike audiences on Meta and Google. The more we acquire, the sharper the targeting and the lower the blended CAC. Past 50K monthly users, direct affiliate relationships unlock better rates and conversions.
Acquisition that compounds.
Every channel catches a different traveller at a different moment of intent.
Chat marketing
Click-to-message ads on Meta and Google, straight into a chat.
- Click-to-message ads on Meta and Google drop the prospect straight into a WhatsApp or Messenger thread with the card-fit assistant, catching them at the highest-intent moment: while they're researching a card or trip.
- Server-side tracking (Meta CAPI, Google Ads, GA4) measures true cost per lead in real time and feeds every converter into lookalike audiences, so spend follows what works and cost per acquisition falls as we scale.
AI Flight Intelligence
A free tool that earns the phone number before the pitch.
- Zero friction (no app, no account, any phone) captures the number at the moment of disruption, when a traveller most wants help.
- Text a flight number, get live status, delay and cancellation odds, and a plain-language read on your rights, covering Canada, the US, Mexico, the UK, the EU, and 130+ countries under the Montreal Convention.
Knowledge base
Compounding SEO in a niche the big players barely cover.
- Already deep: 14 loyalty program hubs, 75+ credit card pages, 50+ interactive case studies, and dozens of points guides. For passenger rights, we analyzed 50,000+ published Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) decisions, the foundation of our rights guides, free flight tool, and Rova.
- The knowledge base is what Rova draws on for its answers. The content sharpens the assistant, and the assistant points to the next page to write.
In-person offer
In person, the hook may be the Custom travel guidebooks: a personalized, narrated trip guidebook that gives advisors and partners something tangible to put in a traveller's hands.
Cleared for takeoff.
| Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Members | 100 | 630 | 1,400 |
| Membership fees1 ($673/yr blended) | $30K | $345K | $850K |
| Card affiliate · members2 (2–3 placements/yr × $150 blended) | $15K | $200K | $550K |
| Card affiliate · free tool2 (non-members, no membership needed) | $70K | $850K | $2.0M |
| Claims3 (15% net share · no membership required) | $25K | $300K | $1.0M |
| Total revenue | $140K | $1.7M | $4.4M |
Potential Revenue Streams
White-label product
licensed to independent travel advisors
In-house travel agency
booking revenue on top of membership
Government funding
for APPR (Air Passenger Protection Regulations) solutions
18 Month Goal
50,000 users / month · 350 memberships · $1M annual run-rate · finding LTV : CAC