Peace Vans bought dormant camping app Sēkr and relaunched it with an AI road-trip planner

Sēkr, founded in 2016, built a mobile app for the van-life community: campsites filtered by real needs such as showers, restrooms, overnight van parking and free Wi-Fi, plus a way to find fellow travelers for activities like climbing or skiing. It raised a $2.25 million seed round led by Storyteller Overland with Backstage Capital, Techstars, Ad Astra Ventures, Crescent Ridge Ventures and GoFundMe's Andy Ballester, and grew past 100,000 users. When the fundraising climate shifted suddenly in late 2022, the app went dormant and the founders decided to unwind it despite the strong user base.

One of those users was Harley Sitner, CEO of van company Peace Vans and a former Microsoft product manager, who had used Sēkr for seven years and had watched it go dormant. He was approached about acquiring the startup in November 2023 and closed the deal in December 2023. Rather than rebuild from scratch, Peace Vans kept Sēkr's original mission, updated the app, and eight months later launched Copilot in June 2024: an AI road-trip planner that combines natural language processing with proprietary community review data and public data, running on OpenAI's GPT, Meta's Llama and other models.

Copilot lives in a new Trip Planning tab: users answer prompts about where they are going and what they want, then get an editable itinerary of camping destinations, food stops and outdoor activities — built to surface community finds like a taco truck in Baja that users rated above a five-star-reviewed Denny's, or unmarked overlooks on Bureau of Land Management land. Basic features stay free; premium features such as offline maps and unlimited messaging cost $4.99 per month.

Eight months after the December 2023 acquisition, Sēkr relaunched with the Copilot AI planner and kept its base of 100,000+ users.

The alternative was shutdown: with the funding window closed, selling the going concern to an operator preserved the community and its data instead of liquidating them.

Sitner was a seven-year power user and a former Microsoft product manager, so diligence risk was low and the buyer already understood what the community valued.

The relaunch differentiated on proprietary review data from 100,000+ users rather than on the generic itinerary skills of large language models.

When a startup's funding road ends, its community and review data can outlive the company — and a power user who knows the product is often the natural acquirer.

As of the June 2024 launch, Copilot was live on Sēkr's updated website and its iOS and Android apps, and TechCrunch put the app at more than 100,000 users. No post-relaunch revenue or adoption figures have been disclosed; the last disclosed round remains the $2.25 million seed. Sitner positioned the tool for the summer travel season, saying it would help travelers 'bypass hours of trip planning.'