The London-based travel tech startup Accomable just announced the closing of a seed round worth £300,000. Accomable was founded in 2015 and helps disabled and elderly people find adapted hotels and holiday rentals.
The fresh capital, which comes from undisclosed investors from the tech and hospitality sector, will enable Accomable, to expand its offering to include thousands more adapted properties, and services such as specialist insurance and transport, targeting disabled and elderly customers in the UK, Europe, the US and worldwide. Accomable describes itself as the “Airbnb for the disabled”.
Accomable was founded by disabled entrepreneurs Srin Madipalli and Martyn Sibley. Friends since childhood and regular travellers, Madipalli (CEO, Accomable) and Sibley are both wheelchair users due to a disability called SMA (Spinal Muscular Atrophy). Frustrated at the lack of travel information available for disabled people, they launched Accomable in the summer of 2015. The company received initial funding from the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University via an initiative to support ventures that deliver social impact.
Since then, Accomable has grown into one of the largest platforms of adapted properties with over 500 properties in 36 countries; with a further 1500 properties in the process of being vetted via a collaboration with travel giant HomeAway. Accomable has offices in London and Austin, Texas, with plans to move into Singapore this year. The company was also a part of an award-winning documentary that premiered in December 2015 at a UN sponsored film festival in New York City. The film charts Mr Madipalli’s journey to teach himself to code in order to build and launch Accomable.
CEO and Co-founder of Accomable, Srin Madipalli, statd: “This investment will enable us to accelerate the growth of Accomable, and become the world’s leading travel-booking platform, not only for people with disabilities but also for the rapidly increasing number of elderly people and people with a mobility issue, who are otherwise scant provided for here in the UK and around the world.”