The travel industry has a data problem it rarely discusses: no one really knows which hotels have roll-in showers, which museums offer sensory-friendly hours, or which hiking trails accommodate wheelchairs. For the roughly 1.85 billion people worldwide living with disabilities, booking a trip often means hours of phone calls, educated guesses, and crossed fingers.
Wheel the World thinks it has figured out how to fix that—and investors are starting to believe it.
The Berkeley-based accessible travel platform closed an $11 million Series A round on February 25, 2026, with $3.5 million as new capital in an extended Series A-II, its third equity raise since a pair of Chilean entrepreneurs founded the company in 2017. The financing was co-led by Enable Ventures with backing from Kayyak Ventures, Vulcano (Dadneo's fund), WeBoost, Samaritan Partners, Impacta VC, and Miles Partnership. Former Expedia chief executive Erik Blachford and Gillian Tans, who ran Booking.com until 2019, both joined as angel investors—the kind of heavyweight backing that signals something more than another travel booking app.
The company has now raised roughly $19 million in total equity funding. That includes a $2 million seed round in August 2021 led by Chile Global Ventures and Dadneo, with checks from Plug and Play Ventures and Susan Wojcicki, who was then running YouTube. A $6 million pre-Series A SAFE followed in March 2023, led by Kayyak.
Building the Plumbing
What sets Wheel the World apart—at least in theory—is that it's not really competing with Expedia or Booking.com. Not exactly, anyway.
Instead, the startup is building something closer to infrastructure: a verified database of accessibility information across destinations and travel services. As of February 2026, the company said it maintains accessibility data covering more than 200 destinations and 8,000 travel services. It has established what it calls "Accessibility Verified" partnerships with over 150 organizations across 21 US states, effectively turning destination marketing groups into data partners.
The model works like this: Wheel the World sends auditors—often people with disabilities themselves—to physically inspect hotels, restaurants, museums, trails. They measure doorway widths, test bathroom grab bars, document whether staff has disability awareness training. That granular data then gets packaged into what the company calls its "Destination Verified" seal.
Mesa, Arizona became the first city anywhere to receive that designation in November 2023. Oregon earned it as the first state in September 2025. Park City, Utah followed in July 2026. Each certification represents not just a marketing win but an expanding network of verified data points that Wheel the World can license to other players in the travel ecosystem.
The Market—and the Problem
Industry estimates peg the global accessible travel market at around $120 billion, though those figures are based on older data from 2020 studies by the Global Economics of Disability and Open Doors Organization. The US slice alone is substantial: travelers with disabilities spent $58.7 billion during the 2018-2019 period, according to Open Doors data.
That's a lot of money chasing very little reliable information. Roughly 16% of the global population lives with some form of disability, per a November 2024 report from Destinations International and City Destinations Alliance. Yet verified accessibility data remains maddeningly scarce. Hotels might list "accessible rooms" without specifying whether that means a wheel-in shower or just grab bars. Museums advertise wheelchair access but fail to mention their accessible entrance is around back, unmarked.
This information gap creates what economists call friction—the invisible tax of extra effort that makes transactions harder. For disabled travelers, that friction often means simply not traveling.
From Berkeley to Series A
Co-founder Álvaro Silberstein knows the friction firsthand. A C5/C6 quadriplegic, he earned his MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business in 2017 and, together with Camilo Navarro, incorporated Wheel the World in California that November.
Before they raised traditional venture capital, the startup picked up a €275,000 non-dilutive grant from Booking.com's "Booking Booster" accelerator program in 2018—early validation from one of travel's biggest players. The platform has since rolled out features like "Accessibility Match" and AI-powered trip planning tools, developed in partnership with Experience Grand Rapids, according to a company blog post from February 2026.
The company runs dual headquarters out of Berkeley and Chile, employing somewhere between 11 and 50 people as of mid-2026, according to its LinkedIn profile. (Startups at this stage rarely give precise headcounts.)
The Distribution Question
Here's where things get interesting, or perhaps murky depending on your perspective. Wheel the World has attracted an unusual roster of travel industry veterans as investors—Wojcicki in the seed round, Tans in both the pre-Series A and Series A, Blachford most recently. That's not typical angel dabbling. These are operators who understand travel's distribution challenges intimately.
Miles Partnership's involvement as both investor and strategic partner hints at deeper integration into destination marketing infrastructure. An April 2026 Expedia Group podcast transcript noted that Rapid API would enable filtering lodging properties by accessibility features—suggesting Wheel the World's data might eventually surface across major online travel agency platforms.
But the revenue model remains somewhat opaque. How much comes from direct consumer bookings versus B2B licensing of its accessibility data layer? The company hasn't said publicly, and the distinction matters. Consumer bookings generate transaction fees but require marketing spend. Data licensing offers steadier margins but depends on convincing larger platforms to integrate—and pay for—Wheel the World's verification work.
The Series A capital will likely fund expansion of that verification network and push deeper integrations with travel platforms looking to serve the accessible travel segment without building the infrastructure themselves. Whether that becomes a Yelp-style consumer play or something closer to enterprise SaaS remains to be seen.
Either way, the bet is clear: accessibility data is valuable, and someone needs to build the pipes.
