About
Why we built it
Marley spent eight years building consumer travel products and planning far too many road trips herself. The maps told her distances. The forums told her opinions. Neither told her how to turn a rough idea into a week of driving that would actually work for an RV, two kids, and a dog who got carsick after four hours. She kept finding herself doing the same work: picking overnight stops, estimating drives, stitching it all together, then redoing half of it because she added a day in the middle.
Theo had spent nine years building language and routing systems. He knew that the hard part of trip planning is judgment, not data: how long to drive before it becomes a slog, which detour is worth the extra hour, which campground actually has sites on a Saturday in July. That judgment is language work, and modern language models are built for it. Roamly is the two of those put together.
The design rule from the beginning was one honest constraint: Roamly is not in the business of impressing you with a route. It is in the business of building one you will still be glad of on day four, when the drive is longer than expected and the campground you booked is thirty minutes past where you thought it was. Routes are suggestions. Roamly says plainly what to confirm, and it never recommends a stop because someone paid for the placement.
We are Pre-Seed, Denver-based, and 11 people. The work is specific: one well-paced route beats a long list of options every time.
The team
Roamly is a Pre-Seed company. The founding team is Marley Hart and Theo Nakamura, with Priya Anand on product, Cole Bennett on the planning engine, and Renata Silva on design. Everyone listed here is based in the United States.
Co-founder and CEO
Denver, CO
Spent eight years building consumer travel products and planning far too many road trips across a stack of maps, spreadsheets and forum threads. Roamly is the planner she kept wishing existed: tell it how you travel, and get a route that actually flows.
Co-founder and CTO
Denver, CO
Built language and routing systems for nine years, most recently turning messy real-world constraints into good plans. He owns Roamly's model routing layer, the pacing engine, and the guardrails that keep every route honest about what to confirm.
Head of Product
Designs the route screen, which is the whole product. Her rule: a traveler should understand their whole trip, drive by drive and night by night, within a few seconds of the page loading, and always know what still needs a phone call.
Founding Engineer
Works on the parts nobody sees: realistic drive times over real roads, overnight stops that actually have somewhere to sleep, and the adapt-as-you-tweak loop that regenerates only the day you changed.
Design
Owns the editorial feel, the route line that draws itself, and the honest-note voice. She keeps Roamly reading like a fine travel magazine and never like a busy dashboard.
The team and investors named on this page are illustrative, as is expected for a Pre-Seed company. The product is real: the planning engine, the pacing logic, the adapt-as-you-tweak loop, and the honest notes all work as described.
The company
Backed by
We raised $900,000 at Pre-Seed in September 2023, led by Switchback Ventures. The money is spent on building the planning engine rather than on advertising it.
Switchback Ventures
Lead investor, Pre-Seed
An early-stage fund that backs consumer software with a clear, humane job to do.
Dana Reyes
Angel
Founded and sold a maps and local-discovery startup.
Marcus Ojedale
Angel
Longtime RV and van-life community builder and product advisor.