Wander is making digital maps accessible offline: You won't get lost ever again.

• Author: Alsever, Jennifer

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY that a startup idea comes to you as a child and comes to fruition years later.

That's the story for AJ Brau, who had her big "aha!" idea in 2010 at age 12 while at Lake Powell with her parents. She struggled to navigate with a paper map as it flapped in the wind, and with a spotty internet connection on the lake, Google Maps wouldn't load. Rather, it was a blank gray screen with the blue dot blinking and moving around by itself.

"I thought, what if we loaded the data from the paper maps onto an app on the phone and connected it with GPS?" Brau says. If she built an app and charged $5 per download, she'd be a millionaire by 16 if the app got three million visitors per year.

That didn't happen. It took two years to build the app, and with $100 worth of homemade flyers, she wound up with 10,000 paid downloads over three years. Users loved the app, but it was expensive and time-consuming for her to maintain. So Brau took it off the app store and went off to do other things: travel to Japan, get a software engineering degree, work for a startup, get married, and have a baby.

"I always thought someone would solve the problem," she says.

No one did.

Yet the problem was huge: four million destinations around the world are still printing paper maps as their primary navigation resource. Including amusement parks, ski resorts, national parks, state parks, museums, zoos, aquariums, historical sites, county tourism offices, and state-level tourism offices.

So Brau, at age 23, returned to the mapping challenge in 2021. She and her former childhood friends Nathan Porter and Aleksa Porter built Wander, a startup with a public app for consumers to navigate trails, amusement parks, and recreation areas offline--ideal in areas without internet access. The company has back-end tools which allow parks and destinations to build 3D terrain map experiences, update data, add content, and hit publish without the need for code, technical skills, or reprinting new maps.

Just a year after its start, Wander hired 14 employees, lined up 10 customers--including San Juan County and Utah Valley--and landed $2.75 million from investors.

"AJ just wowed us," says Greg Beaufait, a partner at Dundee VC, an Omaha venture fund with a $40 million seed fund. "You can tell she's all in. She's been trying to solve this problem for a decade."

In the years since Brau's Lake Powell moment, plenty of others have been making digital maps for destination areas and the...