Friends Alvaro Silberstein, who uses a wheelchair following a car accident as a teenager, and Camilo Navarro came up with the idea for the Wheel the World travel booking site following a 2016 trip to Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. Silberstein said with the help of Navarro and other friends, he became the first person to complete the Patagonia trek by wheelchair. Three years later, about 1,300 people have booked trips through the Berkeley, California-based company’s website, which offers over 400 listings to more than 50 destinations.
Recently, they announced $2 million in a seed round led by Chile Global Ventures and Dadneo, with the support of Plug N Play Ventures and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
Our Take: When Camilo presented at TravelAbility San Francisco in 2019, he had 5 employees and an OTA concept around adventure travel for wheelchair users. Since then they’ve expanded to offering bespoke tours in most major urban areas using a proprietary hotel mapping system that includes over 200 points.
See their first commercial:
To read more about Wheel the World, check out this article in TechCrunch.
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