Atlas Obscura

• 1. Introduction

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  Atlas Obscura describes itself as a catalog of travel destinations that guidebooks tend to overlook, built from both professional writing and reader submissions. That catalog now feeds group trips, a daily podcast, television and film work, and a series of books. Those projects are organized loosely around history, science, food, and the simply obscure. Somewhere between a handful of founders and a company backed by outside investors, its leadership changed hands more than once. Who started this project, and how did it pay for its own growth? Why would its creators eventually be pushed out of the company they built?

• 2. Two Founders, One Idea

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  In 2007, Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras met and began talking about a different kind of atlas, one built around places most guidebooks left out. Foer was already working as an author, and Thuras as a documentary filmmaker and author in his own right. The pair hired a web designer in 2008 and launched Atlas Obscura in 2009. Annetta Black served as the site's first senior editor. The following year, that small team would organize a new kind of gathering for the people reading their site.

• 3. Getting Readers Off Their Screens

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  In 2010, Atlas Obscura organized the first Obscura Day, an international event inviting readers to visit the places the site had been cataloging. Thuras later described the goal in blunt terms: "Creating a real-world community who are engaging with us, each other and these places and getting away from their computers to actually see them."

  By 2021, those local gatherings had grown into Atlas Obscura Societies operating in nine cities. Those included New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

  Eliza Swann took the community in a different direction, teaching an online course on alchemy and related practices through the site. That course sat alongside a business whose daily decisions were increasingly made by people who had not founded it.

• 4. New Names In Charge

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  Sommer Mathis, formerly of The Atlantic's CityLab, became Atlas Obscura's editor-in-chief in 2017 and held the role until 2020. Samir Patel, previously with Archaeology magazine, succeeded her as editorial director in 2020 before being named editor-in-chief in 2021.

  David Plotz, a journalist, became Atlas Obscura's CEO in October 2014 and held the position for five years, leaving in November 2019. Warren Webster, formerly president and CEO of digital publisher Coveteur and a co-founder of the site Patch, became CEO in March 2020. By the time Webster arrived, outside investors had already put real money behind the company for years.

• 5. Raising Money To Grow

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  In 2015, Atlas Obscura closed its first major funding round, raising $2 million from a range of investors and angels, including The New York Times.

  A second fundraising effort brought in $7.5 million. In late 2017, it funded the launch of Gastro Obscura, a food section covering what the company called "the distinctive food locations of the world."

  Airbnb led a 2019 Series B round that raised $20 million, joined by A+E Networks and New Atlantic Ventures. Investors were not the only new presence around Atlas Obscura's name; bookstores would soon carry it too.

• 6. A Shelf Of Books

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  In September 2016, Atlas Obscura published its first book: Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders. Foer, Thuras, and Ella Morton wrote it for Workman Publishing Company.

  Thuras returned to print in 2017 with Atlas Obscura Explorer's Journal: Let Your Curiosity Be Your Compass, again through Workman. A year later, in 2018, the company aimed at a younger audience with The Atlas Obscura Explorer's Guide for the World's Most Adventurous Kid. Thuras co-wrote it with Rosemary Mosco and Joy Ang.

  Cecily Wong joined Thuras in 2021 to write Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide.

  The company also released an Atlas Obscura Page-A-Day Calendar in 2022, covering 365 days of extraordinary destinations and strange phenomena. Its most recent book, Wild Life: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Living Wonders, came out in 2024. That book arrived the year before a fight over the company's direction would reach its own board.

• 7. A Boardroom Without Its Founders

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  In April 2025, Atlas Obscura announced Louise Story as its new chief executive. By November, disagreements over Story's direction for the company led shareholders to vote Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras off Atlas Obscura's board. What she does with Atlas Obscura next, just months into leading it, is a question the record leaves open for now.