What we're building

Be the one who
knows the place.

Why Ricordo exists, how it works, and what it refuses to become.

You know the one. The friend who lands anywhere — new city, Tuesday night, zero notice — and somehow has the place. Not the famous place. The right one. They walk in easy, the night unfolds, and everyone with them feels lucky to be along.

Here's the secret: that ease is built on work. Great experiences take absurd amounts of it — the seventeen open tabs, the cross-referenced lists, the blog post from 2019, the "best of" roundups that are half ads. Most people don't have those hours, so most nights default to fine. Fine restaurant, real money, evening spent either way — and you don't get either back.

Ricordo does that work in the background, all day, every day — so you can walk in like you've always known.

That's the trade: it reads, you live. Radars sweeping every worthwhile source while you're at work. A memory that compounds with every decision you make. And what it buys you runs deeper than time saved — every dollar lands on a place that deserves it. You're plugged into what's actually happening this week, not last year's listicle. When it's your turn to plan the night, you run it with grace. And because you keep ending up in the right rooms, you keep running into your people.

And yes — the feed. The scroll genuinely knows things; that's why the reflex is so hard to break. Ricordo gets you that signal without the hours, the ads, or the algorithm that answers to someone else. Same instinct, pointed at the real world.

This is possible now, and only now. A new class of app is arriving: a voice agent joined to a personal knowledge graph — a memory that's yours, that learns what you love and why, and gets sharper with every decision. Underneath it, agents that read the web tirelessly on your behalf. Around it, a web increasingly built to be read by them.

Ricordo's ambition is narrow and absolute: to be the best in the world at finding places. A guide with local knowledge everywhere, that gets where you're coming from and what you want out of tonight — in your home city, and in every city you visit.

The name

A souvenir, in the oldest sense

Ricordo is Italian — it means a memory, and a souvenir. When Grand Tour travellers reached Rome in the eighteenth century, the souvenirs they carried home were Piranesi's etchings of the city: places, collected, so they could be kept.

That's the whole product, two and a half centuries early. Ricordo builds your collection of places — remembered, understood, ready when you are. It's also why everything here looks the way it does: the engraved city is the timeless one. The glow is the intelligence reading it.

A Piranesi-style etching of a Roman street, resolving into colour photograph Artwork slot 02 · images/veduta.jpg
Piranesi-style veduta, partly resolving into colour photograph
portrait 4:5 · min 1600px wide
How it works

Three machines, one guide

01 · Context Radars

It reads everything, so you don't

Give Ricordo a context — tonight's dinner, a free Saturday, next month in Lisbon — and it sweeps every worthwhile source for it. Not just the obvious ones:

  • It hunts for new sources agentically, scores each one, and decides how often it's worth re-reading — then generalizes: a source style that works in Toronto gets sought out in Lisbon.
  • It monitors upcoming events, catches the latest chatter about them, and finds the places nearby.
  • Everything it finds builds your Collection of Places — ready when you are.
Amber radar rings sweeping over an engraved city quarter Artwork slot 03 · images/radar.jpg
Radar rings over an engraved city quarter, amber sweep
landscape 16:10 · min 1800px wide
02 · The memory

It gets better with every decision

Ricordo keeps a personal knowledge graph: what you loved, what you skipped, and why. It generalizes the way a good friend would — likes a walk through a beautiful neighbourhood after dinner — and applies it vigorously.

After a great night, just talk to it. Speak a thirty-second review on the walk home — a little ritual. You can always revise it sober. The graph doubles back on itself to find connections nothing else could: the bookshop you lingered in last spring is why it's flagging a talk across town tonight.

A constellation of remembered places glowing over a city plan Artwork slot 04 · images/memory.jpg
Constellation of remembered places over a Nolli-style city plan, navy + amber nodes
landscape 16:10 · min 1800px wide
03 · The card

Every place, argued for

When Ricordo surfaces a place, it shows its work. A contextual reason — why this, why you, why now. A context score against your actual preferences, not a stranger's stars. Photos chosen for your purpose. And provenance: exactly where the signal came from, across platforms, blogs, and independent sites.

The card is alive in time, too. A month out, it suggests related spots and nudges you to confirm. Ten minutes out, it's checking weather, travel time, and transit delays.

The place card · every claim traceable
Case study · one skill

How deep does it dig?

Meet san-angel — a Ricordo skill that answers a question no map app has ever heard of.

"If I moved to this city with resources and taste — where would I live, and what would my days look like?"

Not where the most expensive houses cluster. Where interesting, comfortable people have chosen to make a life — and what that life looks like from the street. The architect Aldo Rossi called it the locus: the irreplaceable relationship between a place and the lives lived in it. Every city has a tourist locus — the monument, the waterfront. This skill finds the citizen locus.

It's named for San Ángel, Mexico City — the archetype. High walls, cobblestones, a Saturday market, extraordinary architecture you only glimpse through gates. A whole neighbourhood whose answer to the good life is beauty as privacy.

To find a city's version, Ricordo hunts signals no rating system carries: where chefs eat on their nights off. Where the architects and academics actually live. Where the Saturday-morning ritual happens — the market, the bakery queue, the dog-walk circuit. What the bookstore is. What the street sounds like at 8 AM. Whether it's performing for cameras, or simply proceeding. The tell, when you've found it: you feel slightly like a guest at someone else's Saturday morning.

We built this investigation by hand first — real-estate listings, market schedules, archive blog posts, hours of it, for one city at a time. Ricordo runs it anywhere, in moments, and hands you the 90-minute walk: the residential streets, the coffee anchor, the park, the one surprise. Then what it learns about you on that walk feeds every recommendation after it.

Who it's for

Anyone who goes out the door

World travellers

The trip, curated

Millions want a curated trip; almost nobody has the twenty hours it takes to build one. If it's in a blog post, Ricordo read it. If your favourite chef opened a place there, Ricordo knows.

Mobile professionals

Landed, oriented

The nomad relocating every season; the business traveller who just wants a genuinely good coffee near the hotel by 7 AM. She lands Tuesday — by Wednesday morning Ricordo has the coffee place picked out, the one with the good light, two minutes off her route. New city, zero ramp-up.

Urban outing-goers

Saturday, answered

Your own city, treated like a destination. The rare finds — the basement vinyl store, the gallery in the laneway — surfaced neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

Social discoverers

The back pocket

Dating with the comportment of Bond: walk in like a regular, hold a better second spot in reserve, and never once say "I don't know, what do you feel like?"

Families

Low effort, high hit-rate

Families need the same few things, reliably, with no research budget. A good option that works for everyone — found before anyone gets hungry.

And on a whim

10,000-step tours

Hit your walking goal while satisfying your curiosity. Or hand Ricordo a muse — spend a day in the city as Bowie would have — and let it build the route.

What it refuses to become

Three promises

Your interests alone

No pay-for-placement, ever. A recommendation that can be bought isn't a recommendation. Ricordo answers to the person holding it — that's the entire business.

Memory without surveillance

No PII at signup. Your personal information stays on your device. The knowledge graph is yours — a memory, not a dossier.

Provenance, always

Every place shows where the signal came from. You can follow any claim back to its source — and back out of any source you don't trust.

The opportunity

The trip isn't the spend. The living is.

Booking the flight and the room is a rounding error next to what you spend once you arrive — the meals, the rooms you only hear about from a local, the spontaneous afternoon. And that's before a single ordinary night out at home.

Trillions

An unowned market

Every booking app fights over the thin slice of commission on the flight and the hotel. The vast spend — in-destination experiences and everyday local dining — is orders of magnitude larger, and no AI guide owns it yet.

Now

The platforms are turning

The agentic web is being built this year — Apple's next Siri, Google's proactive agents, a web increasingly written to be read by machines. Ricordo is built to be the places layer on top of it. First in line when the doors open.

Aligned

Paid by the user, for the user

The people who value their time over a price-comparison spend the most on going out — and will pay for a guide that answers to them alone. No pay-for-placement. The business and the user want the same thing: the best night, every time.

Building the intelligence layer for how people actually spend on living well.

For investors →
Raising

The full picture

The market model, the wedge, the roadmap, and where Ricordo fits in the agentic shift — in the deck. Tell us a little about you and we'll send it over.

Or reach the founder directly — john@heyricordo.com