It started on a boat in the Sunderbans
Back in 2009, while crossing India in a rickshaw over 4000km, we made a stop in West Bengal, India where a mammal-filled safari was promised. We didn't see any tigers, but we saw a rhino that didn't move the entire time we stood in the watchtower. We joked that it must have been made of concrete.
Whether there was a sighting or not, you never forget the first safari experience. You either love it or hate it. For me, it was love. The idea of looking for an animal, searching for its footprints, listening to alarm calls, almost seeing it and then finally spotting the creature… there's something inside you that awakens from this raw encounter.
Who is this animal, what is it named, what is its family like, what is it doing here. What will it do next? It's completely unpredictable and that is the most beautiful thing about wildlife safaris.
Over the next decade this curiosity took me to national parks in the United States, Kenya, Sri Lanka, and then finally back to India, in the Sunderbans.
We tracked the mother “Boro Mat”, and her cubs for four days and on the fifth day we finally saw her, and one of her cubs. That experience of seeing that cub still sits with me.
On the boat ride back, an idea came up.
Our guide, Ashok, had access to a smartphone deep in a mangrove forest with great mobile data service. But he didn't have access to the tools to make him more efficient and offer a significantly better guest experience, which would ultimately allow him to increase his rates and improve the livelihood of his community.
What if I could bring together my decades of experience in building technology together with the expertise of guides to build a superpowered experience for guests?
That is exactly where Kapuli was born and we built a robust system for trip leaders — something that takes their tracking expertise into storytelling opportunities.
When we shared the Kapuli mobile app concept with larger tour operators we found that there were much bigger problems that weren't solved yet. Many operators didn't have a single source of truth. They struggled with managing their contractors and keeping their costs down with their razor thin margins.
So we decided to expand the scope of Kapuli and haven't looked back.
Kapuli is the one place where a departure lives, on the operator's own domain and under the operator's own brand.
Built by Kapuli, Inc. · United States · Closed beta · You will speak to the founder
