Veyago Inc.

Veyago is a destination discovery app — a Tinder-style swipe combined with a 4-round elimination bracket — that lets one person, a couple, or up to ten friends in real time turn twenty destinations into one winning trip in under ten minutes, with an AI-generated itinerary and integrated booking links waiting at the finish. We're raising €350,000 on a SAFE at a $3.5M–$4.5M valuation cap to ship the product on iOS and Android in Q3 2026 and run the first 18 months of operations.

The problem

Open any group chat where four friends are trying to plan a trip. Three months in, no one has booked anything. Someone suggested Lisbon in February. Someone else countered with Tokyo. The thread died around April. By July, two of you have given up and re-booked the same place you went last year.

That's not a story about lazy friends. It's the universal failure mode of group travel decisions, and there's data behind it:

1. 78% of group travellers report significant difficulty agreeing on a destination (Statista, 2024)
2. 38 — the average number of online sources a traveller consults before booking a trip (Google Travel Research)
3. 63% of leisure travellers return to a destination they have already visited — not from love, from exhaustion (UNWTO)
4. Zero major apps exist whose primary function is destination discovery and group consensus

The entire travel tech industry — Booking, Expedia, Skyscanner, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, Kayak, Hopper, Google Travel — is a $1.7 trillion market built around the assumption that you already know where you want to go. Every one of those companies sits downstream of a decision that no one has built a tool for.

Veyago is that tool.

Why this is possible now

Three things changed in the last 24 months that make this investable today and would not have been investable in 2022.

Discovery moved from search to swipe. TikTok, Instagram, and Reels rewired how anyone under 40 finds anything new. Search bars feel like work; feeds feel like fun. Travel discovery is the last major consumer category that hasn't moved.

Group decisions now happen in real-time chat. WhatsApp, iMessage, and Discord are where trips get planned and stalled. A real-time multi-user product is finally something Gen Z and Millennials expect, not something they have to be onboarded into.

AI itinerary generation crossed the quality bar. GPT-4 class models now produce day-by-day travel plans good enough to ship. The economics work too — aggressive caching brings cost-per-itinerary below €0.30, viable inside a €4.99/mo subscription with 70%+ gross margin.

The window opened in the last 24 months. The next 24 will decide who owns it.

How the product works

The user opens the app. Five tabs at the bottom: Home, Explore, Map, Trips, Profile. They start a session — solo or by sharing a 6-character code (VYG-XXXX) with up to nine friends.

Round 1 — Sweet 16. Twenty destinations enter. Right swipe to save, left to pass, up to "dream-pick." About 90 seconds of swiping. In group mode, the round is blind — no one sees what others picked, preventing herding.

Round 2 — Quarter-finals. The top 10 survive based on the group's combined picks. Cards now show match badges: "Sarah and 2 others saved this." Cards are personalised to each user's stated vibe, budget, and trip length.

Round 3 — Semi-finals. Five destinations remain. The interface switches to side-by-side comparison — climate, average daily cost, flight time from the user's home airport, visa requirements, weather window.

Round 4 — Final. One winning destination. The Editor (a curated narrative voice) recaps what you almost picked, what surprised the group, which destinations survived the longest.

The AI itinerary. Premium users tap one button. A streaming AI itinerary generates day-by-day — morning, afternoon, evening — with restaurants, transport, daily budget estimates, and integrated booking deep-links to Skyscanner (flights), Booking.com (hotels), and GetYourGuide (activities). First day appears in under 1.5 seconds.

Total time from "where should we go" to "here's a bookable plan": 8–12 minutes.

Who pays

Veyago serves five customer segments, each with different willingness to pay.

Solo discoverers (22–40) want curated inspiration beyond the obvious — willingness to pay is medium for the right product. Couples (24–45) want a neutral arbiter to resolve destination disagreements — willingness to pay is high because the product literally saves arguments. Friend groups (20–35) drive viral growth and want async group consensus without the herding problem of a group chat. Family planners (30–50) need to balance multiple budgets and interests — high willingness to pay because the planning pain is significant. Travel content creators (22–35) need lesser-known destinations as professional inventory, and are the highest-margin segment per user.

The friend-groups segment drives viral growth. The couples and family segments drive Premium conversion. Both compound.

The business model — four streams, live at launch

1. Premium subscription — €4.99/month or €29.99/year. Unlocks unlimited sessions, group size 10 (vs 4 free), the AI itinerary, hidden gems library, no ads. The annual plan is marketed as "5 months free" vs monthly. Target annual:monthly ratio is 60:40 — annual subscribers have ~3× LTV and ~40% lower churn.

2. Affiliate commissions — every AI itinerary surfaces booking links. Skyscanner pays €8–15 per completed flight booking. Booking.com pays 4–8% of booking value. GetYourGuide pays 8% of activity value. Crucially, the business makes more money when users actually book trips, perfectly aligning commercial incentives with user outcomes.

3. B2B sponsored destination cards — tourism boards (Visit Portugal, Tourism Australia), airline holiday arms, and boutique travel brands pay to place curated cards in the free-tier deck. Floor price: €500/month/card. Capped at 1-in-10 density. Sponsored cards must pass the same editorial quality bar as organic ones. Target: 2–3 sponsor agreements at €750/month average in Year 1.

4. One-time in-app purchases — Hidden Gems Pack (€2.99), Luxury Collection (€2.99), Super-Save Boost (€0.99), Session Extension (€0.99). Highest-margin stream at scale and the largest single contributor by Year 5.

No single channel exceeds 35% of Year 3 revenue. Diversified by design — reduces platform risk and pricing-power risk.

Unit economics

The viability of a consumer subscription business comes down to LTV : CAC and payback period.

Blended ARPU per Premium user is €35/year (60/40 annual/monthly mix). Affiliate revenue adds another €22/year per active Premium user. Year 1 churn runs at 35% and improves to 25% by Year 3 — putting the average Premium subscriber lifetime around 3.5 years. That implies a blended LTV of approximately €199.50 per Premium user.

Target blended customer acquisition cost is €2.50 (paid + organic). That's an LTV : CAC ratio of roughly 80 : 1, with payback inside the first month of subscription.

The 80:1 ratio looks aggressive. The reason it's plausible is that group mode is the marketing channel. Every session pulls in 3–9 friends via invite code. Paid acquisition is incremental, not foundational. Even on a more conservative assumption — say 20:1 if K-factor only reaches 0.5 — the unit economics are still healthier than most consumer SaaS at the seed stage.

Competition

The travel tech market is dominated by companies that solve post-decision problems. Veyago is the only product whose primary function is the pre-decision problem.

Booking.com, Airbnb, and Skyscanner do none of destination discovery, group decisions, or AI planning — they sit downstream of a choice the user has already made. TripAdvisor and Google Travel offer partial search-based discovery but no group decision layer and no real AI itinerary. Polarsteps tracks trips after they happen. Hopper focuses on price prediction and booking, not destination choice. Veyago does all three — discovery, group decisions, and AI itinerary — as its primary function.

Veyago is not competing with these companies — it sits on top of them. Every winning destination in Veyago becomes a referral to Booking, Skyscanner, and GetYourGuide via affiliate. The incumbents are partners, not threats.

Why this is defensible

Five compounding moats, in order of how hard they are to copy:

Content library. 200+ curated destinations at launch with photography, budget data, vibe tagging, and editorial copy. 500+ by Year 2. Replicating that catalogue is 18+ months of dedicated content team work.

Network effects. Group mode is the entire growth engine. Every new user is a host who pulls in 3–9 friends. The product gets cheaper to acquire users with every cohort. By Year 2, organic dominates paid by approximately 5:1.

Preference data. Every swipe is preference signal. The recommendation engine improves with usage in a way late entrants can't bootstrap. A competitor launching in 2027 starts from zero against a year of accumulated data.

Affiliate position. Skyscanner, Booking.com, and GetYourGuide partnerships take 4–8 weeks of approval each. Once embedded in itineraries, switching is operationally costly for both parties.

Brand and category. First-mover in "destination discovery" as a named category. The build-in-public narrative, brand identity, and design language create emotional attachment that's hard to dislodge.

Traction — what's done, what's verifiable

Veyago is pre-launch and pre-revenue. What we have is proof of execution against the odds.

Already complete and verifiable on request:

1. Veyago Inc. incorporated — New York C-Corp, April 2026, clean 100% founder cap table
2. Brand identity — full design system, logo, app icon, type system
3. Pitch deck — 4 versions iterated against advisor feedback
4. Business plan — 27 pages
5. App technical documentation — 30 pages
6. Design specification — 34 pages
7. Website documentation — 28 pages
8. VeyagoIntelligence ML architecture documented
9. App ~45% built — React Native + Expo + Supabase stack live in development
10. 200 launch destinations curated and ready for ingestion

In flight, next 90 days:

1. EIN issued (faxed to IRS, pending) → Mercury bank account opens immediately on receipt
2. IP assignment chain: Cassian Drefke → Veyago Inc.
3. 83(b) election filed within the 30-day window
4. Apple Developer + Google Play accounts under Veyago Inc.
5. Trademark filings — USPTO + EUIPO ("Veyago")
6. Privacy Policy + Terms of Service drafted
7. Website live — Home, Waitlist, Build Log
8. Affiliate program approvals — Skyscanner, Booking.com, GetYourGuide
9. App build to TestFlight + Play internal beta — June 2026
10. Public launch — Q3 2026

The team gap, and the plan

I'm Cassian Drefke — sole founder, full-stack builder, and operator. I handle product strategy, full-stack engineering (React Native + Supabase + OpenAI), UI/UX direction, brand, business plan, financial modelling, and investor relations. Before Veyago, I served as Project Lead on an enterprise tenant migration at PvdA (a Dutch political party), delivering a complex ICT transition in a high-stakes multi-stakeholder environment. I'm an award-winning Model UN delegate, multilingual (English, Dutch, French, German), based in Belgium, and actively building a US network in New York. Veyago is the foundation for an O-1 visa relocation.

A solo-founder business has real risk, and naming it honestly is more useful than spinning it. Veyago works as a solo build because it's a product business, not a services business — the moat is content, brand, and user data, not headcount. The technical stack (React Native + Expo + Supabase) is purpose-built for solo-founder velocity. One person can run what used to take five.

That said, post-raise hiring is planned and budgeted: a contract React Native developer in Months 1–6 to accelerate the build, a contract content editor / destination curator in Months 1–3, a part-time growth and social media manager from Month 4–6, and in Year 2 — once product-market fit is established — a full-time CTO or technical co-founder and a full-time Head of Partnerships.

Use of funds — €350,000

The seed deploys against the next 18 months as follows.

€157,500 (45%) — Product & Engineering. Complete the React Native iOS + Android build, backend infrastructure on Supabase, the AI itinerary generation pipeline, QA, and App Store + Google Play submission.

€87,500 (25%) — Growth & Marketing. Year-1 paid acquisition (Meta + TikTok), influencer partnerships with travel micro-creators, App Store Optimisation, PR seed, waitlist conversion.

€70,000 (20%) — Content & Destinations. Photography rights for 200+ destinations, editorial copy for every card, v2 translation preparation for European market expansion.

€35,000 (10%) — Operations & Legal. Ongoing legal counsel, accounting and bookkeeping, registered agent, business insurance, and a contingency buffer.

Average monthly burn after raise is approximately €14,700, which buys 24 months of runway — comfortably past the Series A window in Q1 2028 even on conservative assumptions.

What this seed buys you for the next round

A seed raise has one job: get the company to Series A readiness on traction the market can't argue with.

For Veyago, that means 50,000–100,000 monthly active users, €200,000–€400,000 in ARR, a K-factor of 0.8–1.0(group mode driving organic growth), 4–5% free-to-Premium conversion, an App Store rating of 4.6+, and €15–30k/year in affiliate revenue.

If we hit those milestones, Series A becomes a €4–6M raise at a €20–35M post-money valuation in Q1 2028. That's the base case.

Exit thesis

Consumer travel apps in this category have two realistic exit pathways.

Strategic acquisition is the most probable path. Polarsteps was acquired by Vodafone Ziggo in 2018. Hopper has been a frequent acquirer in the category. Booking Holdings, Expedia, Airbnb, and Tripadvisor all have track records of buying upstream discovery layers when they emerge. Comparable strategic exits range from $10–25M (early-stage acqui-hires like Polarsteps) to $75–200M+ (operating businesses with real ARR like Hopper-tier).

Independent scale through Series B and beyond is less probable on this profile but not impossible — Hopper raised at $5B+ valuations before its corrections; Wanderlog and TripIt scaled into independence. The path requires bull-case execution.

The base case targets a strategic exit in the $10–25M range over 3–5 years. The bull case targets $75M+ in 4–6 years.

Risks — the real ones

Investors trust founders who name their own risks. Here are the ones that matter.

Solo founder burnout is the single largest risk and is partially mitigated by the contractor hiring plan above and a deliberate sustainable working rhythm. Build delayed past Q3 2026 is mitigated by a lean MVP scope — the AI itinerary and full group mode can ship in v1.1 if needed without breaking the launch pitch. Low free-to-Premium conversion is mitigated by A/B testing paywall timing, longer free trial options, and the Hidden Gems IAP as an alternative monetisation path. A competitor launching a similar product is mitigated by first-mover advantage and an 18+ month replication cost on the content library and brand. App Store or Google Play rejection is mitigated by HIG and Material Design compliance from day one and pre-submission legal review of the IAP implementation. OpenAI API cost overrunis mitigated by aggressive 30-day caching by user/destination, free-tier rate limiting, and a fallback to lighter generation if needed.

No business is risk-free. The most material risk is single-founder execution capacity — partially de-risked by the planned contractor hires post-raise.

The ask

€350,000 on a SAFE — YC standard, post-money — at a $3.5M–$4.5M valuation cap.

The minimum direct check is €5,000. The minimum Wefunder check is $100. Approximately €150,000–€200,000 of the round is allocated to Wefunder, with the balance raised directly. The round is OPEN as of April 2026 with a target close in Q2/Q3 2026. We're actively seeking a lead investor and warmly welcome introductions.

What you're investing in. You're not investing in revenue. There isn't any yet. You're investing in three things: a category-defining product idea in the only part of the travel funnel no one has built for; proof of execution from a single founder who has, without funding, produced a complete pre-launch state for a real US C-Corporation; and compounding mechanics — group virality, content moat, affiliate alignment, and AI cost economics — that all get better with scale.

The deck is attached. The full data room — financial model, cap table, business plan, technical documentation, design specification, valuation analysis, IP assignment letters — is available on request.

If you're considering a check above the minimum, or if you can introduce a lead, please reach out: [email protected].

Let's build the start of every trip.

— Cassian Drefke Founder & CEO, Veyago Inc. veyago.app · veyago.app/investors