Johannes Koeppel and the work behind a great escape

Johannes Koeppel had helped build a company around getting people from one place to another. Then, in January 2023, he announced a move of his own. WeTravel would have a new chief executive, Ted Clements. Koeppel would become chief product officer. The founder called the new assignment his “dream role.” In a business culture fond of treating the corner office as the final destination, he had chosen a different seat.

That choice makes more sense if you start several years earlier, with a traveler trying to organize trips for other travelers. Koeppel’s route into software ran through Central Asia, a conversation in India, and an MBA classroom in California. Along the way, he encountered a surprisingly durable obstacle to seeing the world: someone had to collect the money, record the details, and keep the whole undertaking straight.

The glamorous part of travel gets photographs. The administrative part gets another spreadsheet. Koeppel became interested in the second part because he wanted more people to experience the first.

A guide in Kerala, and a question of trust

In Kerala, Koeppel met a guide named Sabu, who organized trips to his native India while living in Switzerland. Sabu was accompanying Swiss travelers on a personalized tour. His difficulty was gaining prospective customers’ trust. Knowing a place, and knowing how to show it to visitors, did not automatically make a stranger comfortable handing over money.

That encounter helped inspire the early Wetravel.to, conceived as a marketplace for trips led by local experts. Its practical concerns were payment collection, marketing, and communication. The attraction of a locally organized trip could be clear; the machinery needed to make it bookable was another matter. A guide could have the knowledge that made a holiday worthwhile and still struggle with the transaction that made it possible.

Koeppel’s own travel work supplied another view of the same problem. Originally from Switzerland, he worked with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. He visited political prisoners and later managed an office. He also organized tours for Europeans interested in Central Asia, giving him direct experience of the work waiting behind an itinerary.

These were trips with several people, several commitments, and money moving between them. An organizer’s familiarity with a destination could not remove the need to keep records. The experience gave Koeppel a practical starting point for a business: work that people were already doing, with tools that made it unnecessarily cumbersome.

The classroom became a departure lounge

At Berkeley Haas, where he earned his MBA in 2015, Koeppel found a ready population of people planning to go somewhere together. Business-school classmates organize treks, make decisions as a group, and need someone to turn enthusiasm into reservations. For an early travel product, this was a useful place to discover whether an idea could survive actual customers.

He received a Hansoo Lee Fellowship in 2014, sharing that year’s award with another venture. The fellowship offered money, mentorship, and connections to students pursuing their own companies rather than conventional summer internships. By a later update that year, Koeppel reported a released beta, 20 organized trips, and more than 250 paying customers. The enterprise had raised $55,000 through competitions and other investments.

Those are modest figures beside the financing rounds that followed. They are also refreshingly concrete. Twenty trips means the software had to accommodate plans made by people who expected to travel. A paying customer is an awkwardly effective critic: praise is pleasant, but a missing payment or confusing booking has a deadline attached.

The founding team brought different kinds of experience. Garib Mehdiyev came from Azerbaijan with a background in technology and banking. Zaky Prabowo, a fellow Haas MBA, had worked in consulting and Indonesia’s presidential office. Koeppel had been organizing trips in Central Asia. Travel was common ground; their professional histories supplied different approaches to getting things done.

The arithmetic nobody puts in the brochure

WeTravel’s public launch in 2016 followed eight months of testing with early users. The platform had already handled $5 million in group trips, with travelers visiting more than 20 countries. Its early audience included students and people leading retreats. Some groups numbered as many as 500. The customers were demonstrating that the organizing problem existed well beyond one MBA class.

Consider the people behind those bookings. A teacher arranging a school trip is temporarily running a substantial travel operation. A dance instructor taking a group abroad must connect participants, payments, and local arrangements. These organizers may be excellent at the experience they offer. They still need a dependable way to administer it.

Koeppel explained the scale with a marching-band example in 2018: 200 participants making 10 payments each produce 2,000 payments. It is an ordinary multiplication with rather extraordinary consequences for the person keeping track. Every installment belongs to a traveler; every traveler belongs to a trip. The organizer must know which obligations have been met before making commitments elsewhere.

His interest extended to the rails carrying the money. In that same period, he discussed the lower costs of bank payments and the frustration of waiting for confirmation. A payment that takes days to settle can be workable months before departure, yet awkward when a traveler is already away and wants a room upgrade. Time matters differently at different stages of a trip.

A business built one introduction at a time

The company’s progress also depended on relationships closer to Berkeley than to any distant destination. Koeppel and Prabowo worked at SkyDeck, the university’s startup accelerator. Haas connections provided advice, introductions, and eventually investment. In 2018, WeTravel raised $2 million in seed funding, with fellow Haas alumnus Brett Wilson leading the round and helping connect it to The House Fund.

There is a pleasing contradiction here. A company designed to help people travel internationally was being assembled through a relatively local network. Business school supplied both early users and people willing to help the venture reach its next stage. Koeppel’s experience abroad gave him the problem; Berkeley gave him somewhere to test a response.

By October 2022, the response had attracted a $27 million Series B. In his own announcement, Koeppel returned to the years spent dealing with emails, handwritten traveler records, and reservation administration. He described the funding as a way to improve the tools operators used every day. The scale had changed considerably since the student trips, while the work he wanted to simplify remained recognizable.

His public writing that year paid particular attention to international transactions. Travel businesses must work across borders, currencies, and differing local infrastructure. A payment method convenient for one customer may be difficult for a supplier elsewhere. That interest helps explain why WeTravel’s development moved beyond creating trip pages into the less visible business of moving funds.

The founder changes seats

The CEO transition arrived on January 5, 2023. Clements came from FareHarbor, where he had served as chief operating officer and acting CEO. WeTravel’s announcement placed the change after a period of growing client and transaction volumes, and after the business had reached $10 million in annual recurring revenue.

For Koeppel, the move had a more personal explanation. He wanted a role centered on product and clients once the business was mature enough to support it. He had built a company to address the organizer’s working day. Now he was choosing to spend more of his own working day on the platform those organizers used.

“Effective today, I’ll move from CEO into my dream role”

Johannes Koeppel, January 2023

The appeal of that decision lies in its specificity. Chief executive carries many responsibilities, including activities far removed from the original product. An earlier description of his work already included customer support, strategic planning, fundraising, accounting, and financial planning. Founding a company had given him plenty to do. The handoff made room for a clearer choice about the work he wanted.

The trip outlasts the job title

The product releases that followed made the ambition tangible. In early 2024, WeTravel introduced inventory management, multi-currency checkout, a calendar view, and pre-registration. The inventory tools linked accommodation availability to bookings. Checkout let international travelers pay in their own currency. A calendar helped operators see trips together, while pre-registration collected interest before a future departure was ready to sell.

These features have little to do with the postcard version of travel. They concern whether a room is available, how a customer pays, and when an operator can see demand developing. Their usefulness is precisely in that ordinary detail. A traveler encounters the finished arrangement; someone else has to make the arrangement hold.

Koeppel is now publicly identified as a WeTravel co-founder. The company names Josh Chang as its chief product officer. In September 2025, WeTravel announced a $92 million Series C led by Sapphire Ventures, with plans for additional AI tools, supplier-network development, and international expansion. In 2026 it acquired Tourwriter, extending its work into software for bespoke trips. The company continues beyond the founder’s original executive assignments.

Outside work, Koeppel has described himself as an avid surfer. During his San Francisco years, a favorite pleasure was being able to surf and snowboard in one weekend. It is a small detail, but a useful one: even while building the infrastructure of travel, he valued the opportunity to go and do something.

The thread through his career is the organizer’s predicament. Someone wants to share a place they know. Someone else wants to see it. Between those two intentions sit booking forms, currencies, schedules, and obligations. Koeppel spent years working on that space between them. The journey can look effortless from the passenger’s seat. His business began with knowing how much work it took to earn that view.