A START-UP that is developing digital apps to easily store holiday diaries has secured about £200,000 in its first round of private funding plus grants.

Summertown-based Esplorio has already launched a web app that allows people to download photos, text, maps and routes from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The fledgling company is now developing an iPhone app by which photos are automatically downloaded to a personal travel diary.

Esplorio co-founder and chief marketing officer Essa Saulat said: “We want to create the simplest way for people to record and share their travels.”

The name Esplorio is a word play on the Italian word for “I explore”, esplorio.

The £200,000 in funding came from both investments – including angel investors Elliott Mackenzie, of Oxford, and Akash Gupta, of London; plus the London-based Startup Funding Club – and several grants. The biggest grant is from the European Space Agency Business Incubator, at Harwell.

Mr Saulat said the company’s longer-term strategy was to generate revenue by using “people’s travel information to recommend trips in the future”, acting as a virtual travel agent.

“Right now in the travel market there is a paradox of choice,” he said. “There are so many choices.”

He said Esplorio would use algorithms to sort through the travel data of people using the apps to make recommendations for individuals’ future holidays, based on past preferences and travel history.

Esplorio would then suggest tourism-related websites to book the holiday, receiving a commission for forwarding a customer to the website.

He said personal details were kept secure. “Everything you do on Esplorio is completely private.”

Users also have to choose to share content with other people, either through a weblink or social media site.

The idea for Esplorio was the brainchild of British co-founder and chief executive Tim Fernando, 31, who attended Magdalen College School in Oxford. After returning from a trip to Sri Lanka, Mr Fernando became frustrated at not being able to find some photos he had taken at a turtle sanctuary and stored on Facebook.

Mr Fernando developed the concept at the University of Oxford’s technology startup consultancy, Isis Innovation, from November 2011.

At Isis, Mr Fernando met Mr Saulat, 26, a Pakistani who completed a degree in business, economics and management at the University of Nottingham’s campus in Malaysia.

They later brought in chief technology officer, Vietnamese-born Sean Pham, 26, a computer science graduate from the University of Oxford, as a third co-founder.