Wrinkles app turns phone into AI audio tour guide for local stories

Wrinkles is an iOS and Android app that transforms location awareness into an audio storytelling experience. As you move through a city, neighborhood, or landmark, the app automatically surfaces stories tied to your surroundings—the hidden history of a building, the lore of a street, or details about a monument—delivered as audio so you can keep your eyes up and absorb your environment. Users can also ask contextual questions while exploring, such as "Where does this water actually come from?" while learning about the Trevi Fountain.

The app was founded by David Stemler, a longtime advertising executive, and Ryan Hansan, an entrepreneur who previously started ScratchDC (a meal delivery service) and TasteLab (a shared commercial kitchen for food businesses). The two have known each other since middle school and have built multiple ventures around travel and local experience. Stemler's eureka moment came during a self-guided tour of the British Museum in London, where he found himself spending the entire visit with his head down, matching numbers on walls to lists on his phone instead of taking in his surroundings. He called Hansan from the airport and posed the question: "If the phone in my pocket knows exactly where I am, shouldn't the places in front of me be able to speak?"

The startup has built a global foundation of 1.3 million points of interest across 177 countries. Beyond this baseline content, historians, museums, creators, and brands can add their own stories and experiences to the map. Users discover stories while exploring or can search and browse the map remotely when planning a trip. The app includes social features—you can follow friends, family, creators, and organizations—and users can save, share, and organize Wrinkles into custom maps and guides. For personal use, families can collaborate to attach photos, videos, recordings, and memories to specific places, preserving stories tied to a childhood home, first date location, or hometown.

Hansan and Stemler see Wrinkles as a tool for daily curiosity, not just annual vacations. As Hansan explained, "A travel app gets used on one trip a year. Wrinkles gets used on your commute, at the botanical garden, at the zoo with your kids, leaving a permanent legacy for a loved one, and on the trip to Spain." The business model reflects this philosophy. The app remains free for users, but revenue comes from the supply side: museums, tourism boards, universities, and hotels pay to create location-based experiences without building their own apps. Creators and media partners can build sponsored place-based guides, and businesses can promote Wrinkles-connected locations. Partners can also add links for booking tours, reserving tables, buying tickets, or visiting businesses, with Wrinkles earning a share of those transactions.