Every leg of a family trip, tracked in real time. Drives, flights, layovers, connecting drives, all in one place — phone, web, voice.
Family travel is fragmented: drive to the airport, fly across the country, land, catch a ride home — each leg in a different app, no shared view. The platform ties it all into one trip, visible to the whole family in real time, across phone, web, and voice.
Family travel was a mess of apps: Maps for the drive, the airline app for the flight, a text for "we landed," rideshare for the ride home. Tracking one person meant juggling four or five tools — and still missing half the picture.
The founders' thesis: a trip isn't one mode, it's a chain. They needed a product that modeled journeys as multi-leg, multi-modal, in one place — so they came to Elevate to build it.
What We Brought to This Project
The founders needed a partner to build it end-to-end: a data model chaining drives and flights, live flight and vehicle API integrations, native iOS and Android apps, and an Alexa skill that can answer "where is everyone right now?"
Elevate's US-based team owned the build: designed around the multi-modal thesis, integrated the data sources for real-time tracking, and shipped a product now positioned for travel and automotive acquirers.
Demand for an end-to-end family journey view was obvious. Nobody had built it: Google Maps stops at the curb, airline apps only track the flight, locator apps don't model journeys at all. Connecting them meant building the data, integrations, and UI from scratch.
Google Maps does drives. Airline apps do flights. Family locators do people. None stitched it into one trip the family could check. The trip data model had to be invented.
Tesla runs its own constantly-changing API; other manufacturers go through SmartCar at a per-vehicle cost. Each integration brings its own auth flow, rate limits, and reliability profile.
"Alexa, where is Mom?" is easy to say, hard to ship. The skill had to handle people, vehicles, trips, and multi-leg journeys — 30+ voice commands with natural phrasing and instant feedback.
iOS and Android had to behave identically. The web interface needed to add capability, not just mirror the phone. The voice skill had to feel native, not like a wrapper.
Flight status from FlightAware. Drive ETAs from mapping APIs. Vehicle location from Tesla and SmartCar. Security wait times from airport feeds. Each source has its own auth, rate limits, and update cadence.
The Core Problem
The market needed a product the incumbents structurally couldn't ship, which meant building everything from scratch.
Trip Coverage
Where each app stops, and where the platform keeps going.
One data model treats a multi-leg journey as a single object. Phone, web, and voice all pull from the same backend — a trip created on the laptop shows up instantly on a kid's phone, or in an Alexa query from the kitchen.
The core of the product. A trip is a chain of legs (drive, flight, layover, flight, drive) tracked as one object with one status. Create it once and the whole family sees it.
Real-time flight data (gate, security wait, departure, arrival) and live drive ETAs roll into one trip view. No more bouncing between four apps to find a family member.
"Alexa, trip update." One sentence returns the active leg, ETA, gate changes, and security wait. Most useful when you're cooking dinner and someone's flying home.
Every trip is attached to a family member. The map shows everyone on one screen with status (driving, in flight, walking, home) — no one has to ask "where is she now?"
Tesla direct, plus SmartCar for 36+ brands. The vehicle becomes the GPS source for drive legs, with controls (unlock, climate, secure) at trip start and end.
Create a trip on the laptop, watch it from the phone, ask Alexa for updates. All three interfaces draw from the same trip model in real time.
Cross-platform was the requirement, not an afterthought. A shared backend handles auth, family graph, vehicle state, and trip logic. Every client — iOS, Android, web, Alexa — hits the same APIs, so a trip created on the web shows up instantly in the Alexa skill.
Vehicle integrations sit behind a single internal interface, so adding a brand — or swapping SmartCar for a direct integration on high-volume vehicles — doesn't touch product code. The Alexa skill is engineered around utterance patterns for natural phrasing, so users aren't locked into rigid commands.
Elevate built what the founders set out to make: the only software combining family location, vehicle control, trip monitoring, and voice in one place — and a strong acquisition target for travel, automotive, and hardware companies.
No competitor combines family location, vehicle control, trip monitoring, and voice across this many platforms. The gap that kept incumbents out now protects the moat.
Phone, web, and Alexa all draw from the same backend. A trip created on the laptop is instantly available by voice. No double-entry, no sync gaps.
30+ commands across people, vehicles, trips, and home, with natural phrasing handled gracefully — beyond most car-brand Alexa skills.
The clean internal API layer lets new partners (Tile, AirTag, Jiobit, dog collar trackers, elder trackers) plug in without product-code changes. Phase-two growth is unblocked.
"What was supposed to be impossible for a single team is shipping today as one cross-platform product that no incumbent can match."
The platform is technology-ready: shipping product, validated architecture, multi-platform footprint, and a voice skill competitors can't match. The founders' cross-platform thesis is now a working product — one travel, automotive, and hardware companies all have reason to look at.
Elevate continues supporting the team as they explore hardware partnerships, more vehicle-brand integrations, and scaling for Alexa, Tesla, and the family-tracking market. The work is delivered by US-based senior engineers using AI-assisted tooling, with a team that treats the roadmap as its own.
Project at a Glance
We'll talk through your goals, share what we've learned, and figure out what's possible. US-based senior engineers, AI-assisted delivery, a team that treats your roadmap like its own. No pressure, no pitch deck.