Our co-founder was inspired to build Traverse Mobile while on a backpacking trip to Thailand in 2011, where he met friends and gained travel tips that planted the seed for the app. Two years later, he realized the need for a simple mobile-friendly way to save and share travel experiences with trusted ratings and reviews. The team validated their idea at a Startup Weekend event in New York City, gaining valuable advice and interacting with potential clients. They then began building Traverse using Swift for iOS and AWS as their infrastructure provider. Research led them to discover graph databases and Neo4j Community Edition, which became their backend database due to its ability to connect the dots and build recommendation engines. The team found an incredible framework from Cory Wiles that helped them interact with Neo4j and create users. Development is progressing, with over 25,000 lines of code, and the beta app is available in the iOS app store under the name Traverse Technologies. Neo4j has proved great for speed, mathematical computation, pattern recognition, and the team is happy with their results. The journey was made possible by the dedication and support of users and the Neo4j team.