Startup Spotlight: RoadGoat maps your travels through your social media activity

Do you use social media a lot during your travels? RoadGoat aims to step up your game by connecting with your Instagram, FitBit, Facebook, and FourSquare to help you map where you’ve traveled. 

Prior to founding RoadGoat, Kurosh Hashemi held leadership positions in product management, corporate strategy, and VC. He founded Philips Lighting’s Ultraviolet LED business, which sold to Apollo with the rest of Lumileds. He’s passionate about locational data and internet of things and holds an MBA from Berkeley. Kurosh is also a member of Travel Massive New York City. 

Here’s our Q&A with Kurosh about his experience as a startup founder.

How did you get into the travel industry?

At my last job at Philips Lighting, I built out new ventures in SmartCities – the intersection of cities and technology. I found myself fascinated with geographic data and how it has evolved with the emergence of the Internet of Things, such as connected cars, smartphones, or exercise trackers.

Connected devices have also sparked a digital revolution in the Quantified Self movement, with such platforms such as Fitbit, Strava, Apple Health, and other personal dashboards. These platforms try to incorporate technology into measuring a person’s daily life.

I started RoadGoat as an experiment to gather all the countries, states, and cities I had ever traveled to – and to do so in an automated, interactive, visually beautiful way.

Explain RoadGoat in 50 words…

RoadGoat (roadgoat.com) helps you share your travels with friends, see where you rank, and get matched with the best destinations to go to next.

Here’s how it works:

1. Map Where You’ve Traveled.
Use our fun map tool or import your travels from Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, Fitbit, and more. Keep your travels up to date automatically, share with friends, see where you rank.

2. Get Matched with the Best Destinations to Go Next.
This is like dating for travel. We use artificial intelligence to recommend destinations based on where you and your friends have enjoyed going most.

What is unique about your product or service?

RoadGoat is already integrated with Fitbit, Foursquare, Instagram, and Facebook, with many more tier 1 integrations to be announced soon.

What makes this unique is that users can pull all their travels into one platform automatically.

Our rich database allows us to find any city you’ve been to, even if that data is synced from 3rd parties. As we learn which places you and your friends enjoy going to, we use artificial intelligence (AI) to match you with the best destinations to go next.

How is your startup changing the future of travel?

We’re building what will be the most personalized travel site out there.

Travel historically has low brand loyalty, especially booking. By creating a comprehensive memory of places a user has traveled, we can personalize every step of the travel planning process from finding the best places for you to booking actual travel services.

What’s another travel company you admire and why?

I’m really impressed by the continuous evolution of Foursquare. Often, companies will put a great innovation in the market but won’t continue improving after initial success. Foursquare introduced the check-ins.

Their consumer app has gotten so much better over the years, to the point where I had to ditch their competitor’s, they’ve introduced Swarm, and they are also emerging as a force in the API world. They’re always on top of new technology and really know the power of GPS. I’m excited to see where they go next.

Follow Kurosh on Travel Massive and connect with RoadGoat on Facebook or Twitter. Visit RoadGoat at roadgoat.com