In the next instalment of our meet the founder’s series we introduce Tethered. Tethered was started by husband-and-wife duo Graeme and Karen Kerr and in this blog, they tell us the story behind the business and indeed the power of stories themselves.

Tell us about your start-up – what problem are you solving and why does it matter?

Tethered makes sleep and wellness audio that is rooted in a specific place. Hotels have spent decades engineering the physical room: mattresses, blackout blinds, thread count, acoustics etc. What no one has solved is the mind. Only one in three travellers say they are satisfied with their sleep while away from home, and J.D. Power found that guests who slept better than expected rated their entire stay 114 points higher on a 1,000-point scale.

Sleep is now a $75.7 billion tourism market on its way to $142 billion by 2032, sitting inside a wellness travel sector that passed $1 trillion in 2024. Tethered gives hotels a sleep offering built from their own location: its history, its stories, its landscape, its sounds. Delivered under the hotel’s brand, bespoke to the property, not a generic playlist with a logo on it.

Tell us more about the team at Tethered and your background?

Tethered was founded in Glasgow by husband and wife team Graeme and Karen Kerr. Graeme has hospitality in his DNA. He grew up around hotels, spent nine years living abroad in international hotel environments, and studied tourism marketing at the Scottish Hotel School at the University of Strathclyde. He went on to found and run a digital agency serving hotel clients, worked in international tourism including the US market with Macs Adventure, and spent time at FTSE 250 scale managing multi million dollar budgets at a $7 billion turnover company. He leads commercial strategy, the fundraise and US market entry.

Karen brings more than twenty years in branding and storytelling craft. She is the architect of Tethered’s place grounded content thesis and owns the editorial methodology and voice creation behind every track. That methodology is the reason retention sits where it does.

What inspired you to start this company? Was there a personal story behind it?

It started with Karen. After losing both her parents in close succession she turned to grief counselling, but it was the empty days in between that were the hardest. The big name wellness apps felt cold and generic, and she found them impossible to stay with. So she made her own: stories, places and voices that actually meant something to her and it worked.

Friends and family started asking for access. The insight underneath is what became the business. Place and story make wellness content stick. Content anchored in a real location, with its culture and its sounds, does something different in the brain than ambient noise does. It gives the listener somewhere to be. Graeme and Karen then spent two and a half years hand crafting a library of over 250 original Scottish tracks to prove the thesis before building anything generative on top of it.

What are your goals during the accelerator programme?

Tethered’s whole thesis is that place matters, so joining a programme built around location data is a natural fit. The team is developing something new around mapping that they are keeping under wraps for now, but it takes the place rooted idea considerably further than a library of tracks tied to individual properties. Access to Ordnance Survey data and the Geovation tech team is exactly what is needed to move it from concept to something working.

What has been your proudest moment so far as founders?

Two things stand out. Firstly, finishing the Scottish library. Two and a half years of writing, recording and mastering over 250 original pieces before a single hotel had signed anything, purely to prove that place rooted content held people better than generic content did. Retention runs at three and a half times the industry average, the app carries a 4.8 App Store rating and there are now 17,500 users globally.

Secondly, walking into Virgin Hotels Edinburgh and hearing Tethered content playing under their brand, in their rooms, built from their city. That was the moment the thesis stopped being a consumer app finding and became a hotel product.

How can people support you?

Tethered is looking to talk to hotels, resorts, country house properties, serviced apartments and short-term rental operators anywhere in the world. If you run rooms, there is a version of this built from your location.

Introductions to wellness leads, directors of sales and marketing, or general managers are always welcome. The company is also raising a pre seed round and would welcome conversations with angels and funds interested in wellness, hospitality tech or generative content platforms.

Consumer website: www.tetheredapp.com

International hotel website: https://www.tetheredhospitality.com/

Scottish hotel website: https://scotland.tetheredhospitality.com/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tetheredhospitality

Company Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tetheredtoscotland/

Graeme Kerr LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/graememkerr/

Karen Kerr LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenkerrbrand