In February 2017, Lioness Magazine — a digital publication dedicated to female entrepreneurs — published a profile on the launch of JOZU For Women, the travel platform founded by Stephenie Rodriguez that would become the predecessor to WanderSafe.
A Portal Built for Women
The Lioness Magazine feature introduced JOZU as a travel portal designed exclusively for women, built on the insight that female travelers have fundamentally different needs and priorities than the market was serving. The platform combined AI-powered destination intelligence, community-sourced reviews, and safety-first design to create an experience that no existing travel platform offered.
At the center of the platform was JENI, an artificial intelligence interface designed to help women travelers find relevant destination information, assess safety conditions, and connect with other female travelers. JENI represented one of the earliest applications of AI to the travel safety space — a concept that would later evolve into WanderSafe's predictive safety intelligence engine.
The Market Opportunity
Stephenie laid out the business case with precision. Women drive the vast majority of travel purchasing decisions, yet the travel industry's products and platforms were overwhelmingly designed without their safety concerns in mind.
"A woman's first tool for contemplating travel is no doubt their smartphone," Stephenie told Lioness Magazine. "We believe that we can inspire women to travel more by removing some of the fear of new destinations and create a place for the serendipity of meeting a new friend while on vacation."
The platform's approach was both commercial and mission-driven. By making women feel safer, JOZU could unlock travel spending that fear was suppressing. Safety was not just a moral imperative — it was an economic catalyst.
The JOZU Philosophy
The name JOZU is Japanese for "well done" or "better than." Stephenie described the company's mission in characteristically direct terms: "JOZU is a Japanese word for 'Well done' or better than, and we deliver products that empower those who are most vulnerable to travel better and safer."
The platform launched with participation in the Microsoft BizSpark Plus program, leveraging enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure to scale its AI capabilities. This technological foundation — data analytics, personalization algorithms, community-sourced intelligence — would later become the software backbone of the WanderSafe ecosystem.
From JOZU to WanderSafe
The Lioness Magazine profile captures JOZU at its moment of greatest potential — a company with a clear market insight, a compelling founder, and a technology platform ready to scale. What the article could not have predicted was the dramatic pivot that lay ahead.
Seven months after this feature was published, Stephenie attended the Women's Startup Lab in Silicon Valley. Mentors there pushed her to go further — to move beyond software and create a physical device that could provide real-time protection. By early 2018, JOZU had pivoted to become WanderSafe, and the Beacon was born.
The JENI AI assistant, the community safety intelligence, the data analytics — all of it survived the pivot and became core components of the WanderSafe app. The magazine feature, read today, is a blueprint for everything the company would become.
Before WanderSafe, Stephenie Rodriguez founded JOZU For Women. This Lioness Magazine profile is where that story began.
Stay safe. Stay informed. Stay connected.