A profile of hiking app AllTrails, which exploded during the pandemic, has raised $225M+, and now focuses on helping users “find your outdoors”, not just trails
Fourteen years and one Apple App of the Year award in, AllTrails has become something rare: a tool that works for both experts and newbies. Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to . X: @ckopf1 , @alltrails , and @nikitarbk Mastodon: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life@mas.to : I'm a huge fan of @alltrails and started using it during the pandemic when gyms were closed. Four years I haven't been back to a gym to use the treadmill and instead take my dogs on hikes around the Seattle area every weekend. — This app realy got me to unlock a bunch of great trails and parks in my city. … X: Curtis Kopf / @ckopf1 : Much deserved praise by @nytimes for the wonderful @AllTrails app which is indispensable on the trail https://www.nytimes.com/... @alltrails : We're on a mission to get more people outside, and this is only just beginning. Check out the latest from the @nytimes to hear directly from our community about how they use AllTrails to find their outdoors. https://www.nytimes.com/... Nikita Richardson / @nikitarbk : every once in a while i have to prove to myself that i can still report so i wrote about how @AllTrails took over for the Style section, check it out! https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
AllTrails’ broadening follows a longer expansion from a trail-sharing app that sold a majority stake in 2018 to a service that, by 2021, reported substantial downloads and paid subscribers alongside a $150M investment from Permira.
The profile frames the pandemic surge as a durable strategic opportunity: the company is positioning its product around outdoor discovery rather than a single trail-finding use case. That matters as interest-led services seek to turn habitual use into broader, longer-lived communities.
First-order effects
- AllTrails can use its pandemic-era audience, Apple recognition, and more than $225M in financing to prioritize experiences that help users identify and pursue outdoor activities beyond locating individual trails.
- Existing users may encounter a wider product proposition, while newcomers can enter through a broader outdoor-discovery message rather than needing to already be hikers or trail users.
Second-order effects
- The broader positioning puts AllTrails in closer competition for users’ outdoor time and recurring engagement with activity-focused platforms such as Strava, whose paid business also expanded during the pandemic period.
- A larger discovery role could make AllTrails more relevant to adjacent outdoor providers and destinations, though the profile does not establish any commercial partnerships or new marketplace products.
Third-order effects
- If specialized consumer apps can retain pandemic-acquired users by expanding from a utility into an interest community, category leaders may increasingly compete on identity, recommendations, and repeat engagement rather than a single core feature.
- The pattern supports a more fragmented social-web landscape in which focused services can grow alongside general-purpose platforms, provided their communities remain useful to both experts and newcomers.
The trend: AllTrails is one example of interest-based apps using pandemic-era adoption to evolve from narrow utilities into broader lifestyle and community platforms.