5–6 Minute Presentation

I’m Saleem, founder of Unravel Travel. I have over 25 years of experience building, designing, and marketing digital products, often while travelling the globe. I’ve always loved tech and travel, which is why I’m building Rova.

I build within my community, from a travel lab in Qualicum Beach, on Vancouver Island.

I started in 1999 as a “webmaster,” building an affiliate site that funded a trip to Costa Rica. I spent years as a digital nomad, teaching myself to build apps from the road. Then I settled into the Vancouver-area startup scene and ran paid growth in fintech: Bench Accounting from seed to Series A, and Clio from Series C to D.

Now I’m putting all of it into one thing.

Cue: land on the map and timeline, then move on.

Rova is the ultimate travel guide. Think Lonely Planet in your pocket, but personal, live, and collaborative.

It covers the whole trip in three parts.

Before you go, Rova curates the trip with you. It matches you to the right credit card in the right moment, and shows you the smartest way to use your points, turning them into the trip of your dreams. We do this by building a guidebook, written and narrated just for you. It can live on your phone, but it prints out great too.

While you travel, Rova comes with you. If a flight is delayed or cancelled, Rova knows your rights and tells you exactly what to say. Say the word, and Rova calls the airline for you: dialing, waiting on hold, and patching you in when an agent picks up. Every call is recorded and transcribed, to get you a fair resolution. And your guidebook updates around every change, so the next hotel, train, and connection all shift to match.

After you land, Rova keeps working. It digs into what actually happened. Rova reads the pattern from 50,000 past decisions, predicts which claims will win, prepares the claim letter. If your compensation lands as credit, Rova will add it to your next plan, continuing this delightful travel cycle.

One guide, for the whole trip.

Cue: slow down on that line. It’s the whole thesis. Change the on-screen tab as you change each beat.

Three ways we make money.

A membership at the core, $58 a month, for the personalized guidebooks, point alerts, redemption strategies, and lab access.

Affiliate revenue from the card work: an approved card pays us roughly $30 to $120, premium travel cards at the top.

And a share of every successful claim. No win, no fee.

The membership recurs. The affiliate and claims revenue we earn alongside it.

And we’re live today.

We have a storefront travel lab in the heart of Qualicum Beach, below a boutique hotel, open to the public, with our first members.

The card assistant is already live. 75 card guides and 50 case studies are published, and personalized guidebooks are rolling out now. We’ve even studied 50,000 compensation decisions, to train Rova and to educate our members.

We’re mindful of privacy and data storage, especially with LLMs in the loop. The doors are open, and the product is in active build.

This raise is about revealing the economics of acquisition and proving that paid can scale.

I’m raising $450K to $1M for my startup, to reach seed-ready in 18 months.

It buys four things, in order. First, product and operations: the guidebooks, the card matching, the flight intelligence, and the data layer that connects them, with privacy built in. Then the top of the funnel: PR, SEO, and Google Ads, finding travellers when they need us. Then the founding team beyond me: a partnerships and operations lead, and a social and sales lead. And finally, paid acquisition at scale, once the platform is proven and the cost per customer is falling.

So this is the boarding pass. Pre-seed today, seed next. $450K to $1M, on a $6M cap, boarding now.

One guide, for the whole trip.

I’m Saleem, and this is Unravel Travel. Let’s talk.

Contact: hello@unraveltravel.world