Investor deckQ3 2026Confidential

You’re
in .

Where do I go?

02The problem

Your saved list keeps growing. And collecting dust.

Then a friend sends three more you have to save.

of group trips never make it out of the group chat.

3.5 stars

is elite in Tokyo. A 4.7 with thousands of reviews usually means tourists.

thing that goes wrong on a Japan trip: talking to a restaurant.

Talker Research, July 2026 · Tabelog rating distribution · Japan Tourism Agency exit survey, FY2025.

03The answer

Never ask again.

A map of places written up by people who actually go. It learns from you. From now on, you know where to go.

$The map: dark Tokyo streets, our own pins, a search box that reads I’m on a date in Shibuya, she wants…$

04The product

Ask like you’d text a friend.

It knows the city, your saved places and what’s on tonight. Every answer is a real place from our own corpus — it can’t name one that isn’t there.

One map. Our own pins.

Nothing scraped. Every pin was written up by someone who went, with the notes you’d get from a friend who lives there.

Every place has a story.

What it’s like inside, when to go, how far it is right now, and whether you can book it. Not a star rating.

It learns from you. Every night out.

It remembers what you loved, notices what you skipped, and brings your taste with you to the next city.

Ask vibe

Thinking

Inside BAR PIANO: red light, antique glass chandeliers

BAR PIANOMaximalist decor with antique glassware and a piano upstairsTil 3AM · Shibuya · ¥¥ · 3 min walk

Thinking

Grandfather’sBasement vinyl bar — rock, funk and soul, low-litTil 2AM · Shibuya · ¥¥ · 4 min walk

Added to tonight’s plan. Three friends can see it.

$The map with our own pins$

A written-up place: Sasazuka Bowl in Shibuya, open til 12am, 11 minutes away

05Who we are

Three people who go out a lot. A million people know of one and watch the other.

Product at Spotify and YouTube scale. Tokyo’s underground rooms. An organic media network that does a million views a post. We can put vibe in front of a million people in a day, without buying an ad.

Chris

CEO

A product designer who changed how hundreds of millions of people enjoy music and video together: Spotify Canvas, the original 24/7 YouTube radio format, and a music project past a billion streams.

Kat

Product

An experiential director who shapes Tokyo’s underground nightlife and car culture, and builds the high-FOMO physical spaces young creators queue up to be part of.

Kole

Marketing

Known online as Tokyo Sims, a viral marketer who knows how to grab the internet’s attention, with an organic media network that delivers over a million views per post.

06How we make money

Visitors buy a week. Locals subscribe.

The city is free to browse. The taste is what you pay for.

Trip Pass, for visitors

$10.99once

One week of the city.

Buy it when you land, use it all week. Nothing to cancel. A visitor spends ¥229,000 in Japan; this is a rounding error on the trip.

vibe+, for locals

$10.99a month

For people who live here.

The longer you stay, the better it knows you. Lifestyle apps price at $10–13 a month; we sit in the band.

¥4 an answer. 97% gross on a paying user. $100k a month is the goal.

07Why now

A great answer now costs four yen.

Two years ago this product could not exist. Next year it costs a third of today.

¥0

One answer with the whole city in context. The same class of model cost four times more in 2023.

people visited Japan in 2025, a record. Almost none of them can read Tabelog.

of people still trust online reviews as much as a friend — down from 79% five years ago.

Anthropic list prices 2023–26 · JNTO 2025 · BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2025.

08The market

$116 billion a year, spent going out in Japan.

What visitors and locals spend on eating, drinking, going out and shopping while travelling — before hotels and flights. We need a sliver of it.

Going out in Japan, 2025

$116bn

Of $251bn total tourism spend inside Japan. Food, drink, entertainment and shopping, inbound and domestic.

Tokyo, visitors only

$22bn

Inbound spend in Tokyo alone. Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto take three quarters of all inbound spend.

Our year-five plan

$37M

5M monthly users, 8% paying. That is 0.03% of the going-out market.

Japan Tourism Agency, 2025 final surveys (inbound ¥9.45T; domestic ¥26.8T; Tokyo ¥3.29T inbound). ¥149.6 = $1.

09Who else

Google gives you 50,000 places. You need one.

Ask Maps reached Japan this month — a chat box on the same review pile. A stranger’s account of one of 50,000 places, nothing curated, and the decision is still yours.

Google MapsEvery place on earth and no way to choose. Google removed 292 million fake reviews last year; people trust the rest half as much as they did. You use it because you have to.
TabelogJapan’s default. 92 million monthly users, food only, English since last November as a translation layer.
Instagram · TikTokWhere you see it. Not where you act on it.
Corner · BeliTaste apps for New York with $16M raised between them. No Japanese, no events, and DoorDash’s try at this shut in four months.
vibeNot a list. An answer. Written by people who went, in English and Japanese, and it already knows what you like.

10Expansion

Tokyo today. Any city in a day.

A new city spins up in under 24 hours. Tokyo was the hard one.

🇯🇵TokyoLive🇹🇭BangkokLive🇯🇵Osaka🇯🇵Kyoto🇺🇸New York🇰🇷Seoul🇸🇬Singapore🇭🇰Hong Kong🇹🇼Taipei🇮🇩Bali 🇯🇵TokyoLive🇹🇭BangkokLive🇯🇵Osaka🇯🇵Kyoto🇺🇸New York🇰🇷Seoul🇸🇬Singapore🇭🇰Hong Kong🇹🇼Taipei🇮🇩Bali

🇫🇷Paris🇬🇧London🇪🇸Madrid🇪🇸Barcelona🇩🇪Berlin🇳🇱Amsterdam🇵🇹Lisbon🇺🇸Los Angeles🇺🇸San Francisco🇨🇦Toronto🇲🇽Mexico City🇦🇺Melbourne 🇫🇷Paris🇬🇧London🇪🇸Madrid🇪🇸Barcelona🇩🇪Berlin🇳🇱Amsterdam🇵🇹Lisbon🇺🇸Los Angeles🇺🇸San Francisco🇨🇦Toronto🇲🇽Mexico City🇦🇺Melbourne

Twenty-five cities already seeded in the app. Live in Tokyo and Bangkok; Osaka is being written now.

11How much

A pre-seed to launch, and to prove people pay.

The product is built and the reach is in the room. The money buys the launch, the first paying cohort in Tokyo, and the next two cities.

$500k

Post-money SAFE

$10M

Cap — the market median for this round size

Ownership at the cap

Months of runway on the base case

Month 3

App Store live. Trip Pass and vibe+ on sale. Osaka written.

Month 6

First 1,000 paid trips. Import shipped. Kyoto live.

Month 12

Three cities. $30–50k a month. A Series A conversation on real cohorts.

See the live model: assumptions, three years, risks →

12How you make money

If it works, this is Letterboxd for places.

Letterboxd sold 60% at a $50–60M valuation with 10M members, and was in sale talks at around $250M three years later with 30M. Taste communities compound.

Base case

$3M run-rate in year three across Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and New York. A Series A at 8–12× revenue marks the company at $25–35M: 2.5–3.5× the cap.

If it works

$8M run-rate in year three across five Tokyo-equivalents. At the same multiples, $65–95M: 6–9× the cap, before an exit.

Year five

The plan behind the deck is 5M monthly users with 8% paying: $37M of revenue. At 6–10×, $220–370M — 22–37× on this round.

hello@whatsthevibe.io

You’re in .