Wrinkles App Turns Your Location Into an AI-Powered Audio Tour Guide
A new app called Wrinkles wants to change the way people experience the world around them. Available on iOS and Android, Wrinkles uses your location to automatically uncover stories, history, and local details about nearby places, turning everyday walks, commutes, vacations, and museum visits into immersive audio experiences.
Instead of forcing users to stare at a screen, Wrinkles is designed to let people keep their eyes on the world in front of them. As you move through a city, neighborhood, landmark, museum, park, or historic street, the app can surface stories about buildings, monuments, hidden corners, and local legends. In many ways, it acts like an AI-powered audio tour guide that travels with you wherever you go.
The goal is simple: make places feel alive.
Wrinkles was founded by David Stemler, a longtime advertising executive, and Ryan Hansan, an entrepreneur who previously founded ScratchDC, a meal delivery company, and TasteLab, a shared commercial kitchen built to support independent food businesses.
Stemler and Hansan have known each other since middle school, and travel has played a major role in their friendship for decades. They started taking international trips together as teenagers and still travel together today, now with their families. Over the years, many of their business ideas have come from conversations during those trips, often sparked by the same question: how could this experience be better?
Wrinkles grew out of that mindset.
The idea came to Stemler during a visit to the British Museum in London. He was using the museum’s official app for a self-guided tour and found himself spending more time looking down at his phone than looking at the exhibits around him. The app worked, but the experience felt disconnected from the environment.
“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 said. After leaving London, he called Hansan from the airport with a thought: if a phone already knows exactly where someone is, shouldn’t the places around them be able to speak?
That question became the foundation for Wrinkles.
The app has already built a large global map of more than 1.3 million “Wrinkles,” which are points of interest tied to specific places. These locations span 177 countries, giving users access to a wide range of stories and historical context whether they are exploring a major city, visiting a tourist attraction, or simply walking through their own neighborhood.
Wrinkles is not limited to its built-in content. Historians, museums, creators, brands, universities, tourism boards, and other organizations can add their own location-based stories to the platform. This gives the app the potential to become a living map filled with professional tours, cultural guides, personal memories, and local knowledge.
Users can discover stories in real time as they move through the world, or they can explore remotely by searching the map and browsing different places before visiting them. That makes Wrinkles useful not only during travel, but also while planning a trip, researching a destination, or learning more about a hometown.
One of the app’s most interesting features is its interactive question system. While listening to a story about a place, users can ask follow-up questions, similar to how they might speak with a human guide. For example, if the app is explaining the history of the Trevi Fountain, a user might ask, “Where does this water actually come from?” Wrinkles can then provide additional context, making the experience feel more natural and conversational.
The app also includes social and personal features. Users can follow friends, family members, creators, and organizations. They can save favorite Wrinkles, share them with others, or organize them into custom maps and guides. This makes it possible to build personalized walking tours, family history maps, travel itineraries, or collections of meaningful places.
Wrinkles also allows users to attach personal memories to physical locations. Families can add photos, videos, audio recordings, and written stories to specific places, preserving memories tied to a childhood home, a favorite restaurant, a first date spot, a school, or a hometown landmark. Over time, this could turn the app into a digital archive of personal and family history connected to real-world places.
Hansan and Stemler see Wrinkles as much more than a travel app. While it can help tourists discover the hidden history of a new city, they believe its bigger opportunity is in everyday curiosity. The app is meant for people who want to better understand the places they pass regularly, from the old building on their commute to the public art in a local park.
“The common thread isn’t travel — it’s curiosity,” Hansan said. “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.”
That broader vision could help Wrinkles stand out in the growing market for AI-powered apps, travel technology, and location-based experiences. Instead of focusing only on navigation or destination planning, Wrinkles focuses on storytelling. It aims to give people a deeper connection to the physical spaces they move through every day.
Although the founders have tested a freemium model, they say they are committed to keeping Wrinkles free for users. The company’s business model is mainly built around partners such as museums, tourism boards, universities, hotels, creators, media companies, and local businesses.
For these partners, Wrinkles offers a way to create location-based experiences without having to build and maintain their own standalone apps. A museum could create an audio guide, a university could build a campus history tour, a hotel could recommend nearby attractions, or a tourism board could design a citywide walking experience.
Creators and media partners can also build sponsored place-based guides, while businesses can promote Wrinkles tied to their own locations. In some cases, partners may add options for users to book tours, buy tickets, reserve tables, or visit nearby businesses, with Wrinkles earning revenue from those transactions.
Looking ahead, Stemler and Hansan want Wrinkles to become a normal part of how people explore and understand places. That could mean using it to learn about a college campus, uncover local stories in your own city, build a custom travel map, preserve family memories, or discover the hidden past of a destination while visiting for the first time.
At its core, Wrinkles is built around a simple but powerful idea: every place has a story. The app’s mission is to make those stories easier to hear, easier to share, and easier to remember.
