A new app called Wrinkles is trying to make local discovery feel less like searching a screen and more like listening to the world around you. Available on both iOS and Android, the app uses your location to automatically bring up stories tied to the places nearby.
At its simplest, Wrinkles works like an AI-powered audio tour guide. It can explain the background of a building, the history of a street, or bits of local lore as users move through a city, museum, campus, neighborhood, or familiar hometown.
An audio guide built around where you are
The core promise of Wrinkles is that users should not have to keep looking down at a phone to learn what is in front of them. The app is designed around movement: as a person walks, it can surface relevant stories connected to the surrounding environment.
That framing matters because many self-guided tour tools still require a lot of manual attention. Users often have to match numbers, select stops, scan lists, or otherwise manage the interface while trying to experience the place itself.
Wrinkles was shaped by that exact frustration. David Stemler, one of the company’s founders and a longtime advertising executive, came up with the idea while using the British Museum’s official app for a self-guided tour in London. He thought the app was well designed, but the experience did not work the way he wanted.
“I spent the entire visit heads-down, matching numbers on the walls to lists on my phone instead of taking in my surroundings while learning about them,”
Stemler later called co-founder Ryan Hansan from the airport and asked, “If the phone in my pocket knows exactly where I am, shouldn’t the places in front of me be able speak?”
The founders see curiosity as the real use case
Wrinkles was founded by Stemler and Hansan, who previously founded ScratchDC, a meal delivery service, and TasteLab, a shared commercial kitchen that helped independent food businesses launch and grow.
The two have known each other since middle school. Travel has long been part of their friendship, from trips abroad as teenagers to trips today with their families. According to the source article, many of their business ideas have come from conversations while traveling and asking how the experiences around them could be improved.
That background helps explain why Wrinkles sounds like a travel product at first, but is being positioned more broadly. The app can support spontaneous exploration in a new city, but the founders also want it to fit into ordinary routines: walking past the same buildings, visiting a botanical garden, taking children to the zoo, or learning more about a hometown.
“The common thread isn’t travel — it’s curiosity,”
Hansan said. He added that a travel app might be used once a year, while Wrinkles is meant for a commute, family activities, personal legacy, and trips such as one to Spain.
A large map of points of interest
The company has built a global foundation of 1.3 million Wrinkles, or points of interest, across 177 countries. These points form the base layer of the product: places that can be discovered, listened to, searched, or browsed on the map.
The app is not limited to that foundational content. Historians, museums, creators, and brands can add their own stories and experiences to the map. That gives Wrinkles two connected audiences: people who want to discover stories, and organizations or creators that want to publish place-based content.
Users can also explore Wrinkles remotely. That means the map can support trip planning and armchair discovery, not only in-person walking tours. Someone could browse a city before visiting, or look around a place they are curious about from elsewhere.
The AI element also makes the experience more conversational than a fixed audio track. Users can ask questions while exploring. The source gives one example: while learning how the Trevi Fountain was built, a person could ask, “Where does this water actually come from?”
Social maps and personal memories
Wrinkles includes social features as well. Users can follow friends, family, creators, and organizations, then save and share Wrinkles. They can also organize them into custom maps and guides.
That turns the app into more than a passive audio layer. A creator might build a guide around a set of places. An organization might publish an experience for visitors. A family might collect meaningful locations and keep them together in a private or shared context.
The family memory feature is one of the more personal parts of the product. Users can attach family memories, photos, videos, and recordings to specific places. Families can collaborate on histories tied to a childhood home, a first date location, or a hometown.
That suggests a broader idea: places are not only public landmarks. They also carry personal meaning. Wrinkles is trying to support both kinds of story, from institutional history to the memories people associate with ordinary locations.
How Wrinkles plans to make money
Stemler and Hansan have experimented with a freemium model, but they say they are committed to keeping the app free for users. The revenue model is focused mainly on the supply side.
Museums, tourism boards, universities, and hotels can use Wrinkles to create location-based experiences for visitors without building their own apps. For those groups, the pitch is that Wrinkles can become a ready-made layer for publishing audio stories, guides, and other place-based experiences.
Creators and media partners can build sponsored place-based guides. Businesses can promote Wrinkles connected to their locations. Partners can also add links that let users book tours, reserve tables, buy tickets, or visit businesses, with Wrinkles earning a share of those transactions.
The long-term vision is for Wrinkles to become a normal part of how people understand places. That could mean learning the history of a college campus, rediscovering a city they already know, browsing a map while planning a trip, or getting a deeper understanding of a city they are visiting for the first time.