Welcome debuts a smarter city guide app on iOS, backed by $3.5M led by Accel | TechCrunch

When you’re exploring a city — whether one you’re visiting on your travels or your own — there are a number of tools that can help you find out where to go, what to see and what to do, like Google Maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor and others. But a startup called Welcome thinks that today’s set of tools could be smarter and more personalized to the individuals who use them. Its new app instead uses “real-time” technologies to make recommendations that take into account a user’s preferences as well as other details about their current context — like the weather, season, traffic and the popularity of the place at the current time of day — in order to provide a better-curated set of recommendations. The end result is meant to be a city guide that’s more like “a concierge in your pocket,” says Welcome co-founder Matthew Rosenberg. Image Credits: Welcome Rosenberg says he was inspired to build Welcome after traveling, pre-pandemic, with his then-girlfriend, now-wife, following the acquisition of his first company, a mobile video creation app called Cameo, by Vimeo. During this time, the couple explored parts of Europe, Latin America, and the U.S., which was an amazing experience he says,…
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