Detour, a tourism content platform that was founded by Groupon Co-Founder Andrew Mason, has been acquired by audio equipment manufacturer Bose.
In a Medium post Mason published last week, Mason said that Bose is “a huge fan of the Detour experience” and that it thinks it could be a valuable asset to the company’s augmented reality platform, Bose AR.
The startup will continue to manage the app and content through the end of May, but after that, it appears that Bose plans to shut the app down unless it can find a partner to relaunch Detour’s content with. Exact terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
"Bose expects the Detour content to re-emerge and be made available via a new partner," Mason wrote in the Medium post.
Launched in San Francisco in 2015, Detour is a tourism app that takes users on narrated walks through cities. It operates in major cities worldwide, from San Francisco to New York to Paris. It launched in Chicago in 2016. The tours are narrated by locals, like journalists and activists, giving users an authentic look at the city they are visiting.
“Thank you to the producers, engineers, designers, and storytellers that made Detour what it is over the last four years,” Mason wrote. “I’m excited to see where Bose takes it.”
Mason and his team at Detour have now moved on to Descript, an audio word processing platform that allows for the editing of sound files and lyrics. Mason founded the company in 2017 in San Francisco. According to Crunchbase, the startup has raised $5 million in venture capital funding from Andreessen Horowitz.
Mason co-founded Chicago-based Groupon in 2007 with Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky. But when the company's business sputtered after going public, Mason was ousted in 2013 after serving as the company's CEO for more than four years.
