Heygo
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Heygo was a London-based travel-tech platform founded in 2020 by university friends John Tertan and Liam Garrison (originally called Virtualtrips). It offered free live-streamed virtual tours led by local guides around the world, with interactive chat, an on-screen map and digital postcards. Revenue came from viewer tips, of which guides kept 60% and Heygo took a 40% commission. It reached two million bookings by early 2022 and raised a $20 million Series A led by Northzone in February 2022.
02 / Heygo FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors
Heygo could not make the virtual-tour platform financially viable post-Covid; challenging economy; sale/rescue options exhausted; founder John Tertan: metrics changed post-Covid, market not big enough for capital raised.
not financially viable in a post-Covid world; Tertan/Skift: metrics changed post-Covid, market not big enough for capital raised.
challenging economic situation made viability even more difficult.
efforts to sell the operation proved unsuccessful; all rescue options exhausted.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Product or service closed
platform access ceases 2023-04-11 noon UK time after exhausting options; Skift 2023-04-13 confirms permanent shutdown after ~3 years and $20M Series A.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Raised $20 million in a Series A led by Northzone in February 2022.
- 02
Ceased operations on April 11, 2023, after post-pandemic demand for virtual tours collapsed; efforts to sell the company were unsuccessful.
- 03
Returned remaining capital to investors, per the founder; no reliable loss figure was disclosed.