About tripku

Tripku is a tool for outgoing travelers to find each other and collaborate to create their next adventures together.

Those who love scuba diving, hiking, surfing or other destination sports know what it's like to yearn to travel when their friends don't share the same passion -- or schedule. That leaves few options, join a standard trip that's not customized to what you're looking for, try your luck finding companions on message boards, or just skip the trip altogether.

But with so many people looking for travel buddies, we knew there had to be a way to bring together people with the same interests and availability. That's how tripku was born.

Join the community and start tripkuing!

For more information on how tripku works, watch our video

The people behind tripku

The most important people behind tripku are our users! But these you will have to login to start getting to know. ;-) Just to give you an idea, we are the founders – and also avid tripkuers:

Beatriz Cardona, Founder & CEO

Beatriz is an entrepreneur from Barcelona (Spain). She has lived all her live in her beloved Barcelona. In the summer of 2010 she moved to San Francisco for 3 months to follow her entrepreneurial dream. It was the beginning of tripku and Beatriz’s new life.

She calls it new life because living as an entrepreneur for her is to make the big decision of getting out of her comfort zone and setting her life towards realizing her dreams. Everybody has a dream – usually many! Bea’s 3 biggest dreams are to fly a plane, to go on a round-the-world journey like William Perry Fogg and to see Earth from above! While “entrepreneuring” is a way of life, tripku is a way of bringing herself – and many other adventurers-wanna-be – a step closer to the realization of their big adventure dreams.

“I had already traveled four continents by the time I decided that my big (ad)venture for the next years would be tripku. I absolutely love adventure sports, particularly “air” activities like paragliding, skydiving, and ballooning. I’m a soft adventurer, I like to be trying out new stuff all the time, so there’s always something completely new to learn and experience. I knew that there were many people out there who shared the same passion – but most people find it really difficult to take the first step. To make it harder, in most cases you need to form a group to able to practice these adventure sports, and finding friends who share the same passion and schedule is an additional barrier. I found that there had to be a way to fix this and that technology – after all, I’m an Engineer – was the way. Adventure sports and, better, adventure traveling can be truly life-changing! I had to make it easier for people to realize their adventure dreams.”

On a more LinkedIn style: Beatriz is a Multimedia Engineer with over 10 years of experience in IT, Web and innovation. She is also an Executive MBA from IESE, which helped shape her team leading and general management view. She also helped founding Ellas 2.0 Barcelona (Women 2.0’s local chapter) which supports tech women entrepreneurs win their space in the market – this is a movement she supports wherever she goes.

Alice Neves Thomé, Co-founder & CMO

There are two questions Alice gets all the time and always finds it hard to answer: “Where are you from?” and “Where do you live?” She was born in Rio, Brazil but most people think she’s Irish. She’s also lived in four other cities in three countries through her life. In the past year she has gotten used to living a nomad life and, really, home has a rather abstract meaning for her. She thinks of herself as a world citizen with a Brazilian soul.

“There are many places I haven’t been to in the world and in Brazil – and there’s always going to be the unknown. But I don’t want to ever stop exploring. I believe we all need to think more about the planet – and less about our country with its imaginary borders – as our home. The Internet and many new technologies bring us much closer together in the virtual space. We have to use it as a way to bring us closer together face-to-face, hug-to-hug. So let’s get out and see the world!”

On a more LinkedIn style: Alice holds a B.A. in Tourism and an MBA from IE Business School. Her professional experience has always been in small, highly entrepreneurial organizations where she had to use a lot of creativity and her ability to keep her team motivated to deliver seamless experiences to clients and build long-lasting relationships. Alice speaks Portuguese, English and Spanish – she wishes she could still remember some Czech from the years she lived in Prague!