Video Made Promises to Travel – Someone Is Finally Cashing Them In

01 /The Concept

Video made a lot of promises to the travel industry. Unravel is the company making good on them – selling trips the way TikTok sells attention, through an endless feed of short clips.

Those clips show beautiful destinations worth visiting.

Beautiful hotels and properties worth staying in.

And purpose-built day-by-day itineraries for specific locations – each waypoint backed by a short video that shows, rather than tells, why it's worth going.

From inside the app, users can move directly from inspiration to purchase: flights, accommodation, and experiences, all in one transaction.

The clips are shot by travel creators, who presumably share in revenue from bookings driven by their content. An AI curates each user's feed to align with their interests and improve the conversion from watching to booking.

In short: Unravel is TikTok for travel. It first appeared on radar [back in 2023](/review/ne-vylozhil-fotochki-schitaj-ne-otdohnul) when it raised its initial $1.25 million. It has now raised a new $7 million round – with the former CEO and CFO of Booking.com among the investors.

02 /Why It Matters

Video is an obvious fit for selling travel. Unravel isn't the only company to have figured this out. Travly ([reviewed here](/review/ljudi-stali-vybirat-glazami)) – whose founders run popular travel accounts on TikTok and Instagram – built a similar app. The difference: Travly hasn't yet embedded purchasing inside the app itself, so bookings require a redirect to Booking.com.

Travly also takes a more open creator model – anyone can upload clips – but the AI filters aggressively for content that actually converts. To incentivize uploads, Travly shares a portion of the commissions it earns from Booking.com.

Video also works well beyond travel – handmade goods, art, and other items where the product's appeal requires context and story. Sellou ([covered here](/review/na-jetom-rynke-prodajut-ne-ceny-i-nalichie-a-istorii)) built a marketplace along those lines, with video storefronts for independent makers and boutique retailers.

At first glance, this all looks like a straightforward "TikTok for X" trend – which it is. But what caught attention was a brief line on Unravel's website: "we have an API."

Over the past year, Unravel has been quietly pivoting toward banks, airlines, and telecom operators, getting them to offer travel to their existing customer bases – either through direct sales or as a loyalty program redemption option, so customers can use accumulated points to pay for trips fully or partially.

Travel as a loyalty reward is a significant angle. As Superlogic ([reviewed here](/review/hochesh-imet-lojalnyh-klientov-dari-im-jemocii)) has argued, experiences are the most effective currency for building genuine customer loyalty. Superlogic built a platform where companies can plug in "unforgettable experiences" – courtside seats at playoff games, VIP concert access, backstage Broadway tours, private dinners with celebrity chefs – as loyalty rewards. It has raised $21.7 million, including $13.7 million this past February.

Travel fits naturally into that same logic. Especially travel presented through compelling video.

Unravel has already signed up "leading banks, insurance companies, and telecom operators across Asia and the Middle East" and is now actively expanding into Europe and the UK.

This B2B strategy was made possible by a broader shift: financial institutions and telcos are increasingly interested in monetizing their existing customer relationships by selling adjacent services. Travel, which most people do at least once or twice a year, is a natural fit.

This pivot is also what unlocked the current round. The lead investor, European VC firm Nauta, invests exclusively in B2B companies. Unravel has quietly become a B2B startup – something that wasn't obvious from the original product.

03 /Opportunities

The most direct play is building video-native marketplaces or storefronts for categories where "see it to buy it" is the natural dynamic.

Travel – a trillion-dollar market – is probably the richest such category. Which also makes it the most competitive. Picking a narrower niche might be the smarter move. What could those niches be?

The less obvious direction is the B2B2C pivot: selling something to companies that they can resell to their own customers – and specifically selling something outside their core business, as a new revenue stream on top of an existing customer base. A few examples from prior reviews:

Gigs ([covered here](/review/luchshe-stat-uspeshnym-svodnikom-chem-neudavshimsja-izobretatelem)) raised $97 million for a platform that lets any company – a bank, a retailer, anyone – launch a branded mobile carrier. MealMe ([reviewed here](/review/proshhe-kormitsja-na-chuzhoj-klientskoj-baze)) raised $16 million so any app could integrate food delivery from a million restaurants; Uprise ([covered here](/review/vygodnee-ne-iskat-klientov-samomu)) did the same for embedded financial advisory at $4.7 million.

Nuitee ([reviewed here](/review/takaja-shema-raboty-rezko-stala-vostrebovannoj)) raised $48 million for hotel booking infrastructure that can be embedded into airline apps, banking apps, telco apps, and creator newsletters.

For creators specifically, Supersquad has built the same model for group tours – letting influencers sell turnkey trips to their followers directly.

The opportunity space is substantial. But if the Unravel angle is the frame, what makes the embedded model especially compelling is the "value-added" layer: Unravel doesn't just pass a list of trips through its API – it passes video, which converts better, which generates more revenue for partner companies than a plain listing would.

So the underlying question is: what can you offer companies to embed in their products, and what additional value layer on top of the product itself would make those conversions significantly higher than the baseline?