What Became of Handiscover's EIC Accelerator Accessible Travel

Handiscover Sweden AB wanted to be the booking site where people with disabilities could trust what a hotel said about its ramps, lifts and bathrooms. In the European Innovation Council's January 2020 cut-off it was one of the companies the European Commission selected for blended finance, a grant plus EIC equity, under the EIC Accelerator pilot of Horizon 2020. The list names Handiscover alone for the project, with no partner companies. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,616,387.50 towards a total cost of €2,309,125 for a 24-month project that started on 1 June 2020.

Six years later the company no longer exists in its original form. Handiscover Sweden AB was placed in bankruptcy on 10 May 2024, according to Kreditrapporten and Newsworthy, and Ratsit, which draws on the Swedish Companies Registration Office (Bolagsverket), gives its status as "Konkurs avslutad 2025-12-16", bankruptcy concluded. Its founder, Sebastien Archambeaud, now sells the same kind of accessibility software through a separate company, Haccess AB, registered at the same Båstad address.

Where Handiscover Stands Now

The register record is short. Ratsit and Syna both list Handiscover Sweden AB as bankrupt; Ratsit adds that it is deregistered for F-tax and no longer registered for VAT or as an employer, and North Data marks the company as terminated. Under the Swedish Companies Act a company whose bankruptcy ends without a surplus is dissolved when the bankruptcy is concluded (chapter 25, section 50); a surplus would instead send it into court-ordered liquidation, and no such liquidation appears in the registers checked. The last annual accounts on file are for 2022.

What led to the failure is only partly public. The business weekly Rapidus reported on 20 May 2024 that Handiscover's financing plan "fell apart at the last moment" and that it was unclear whether the service would survive; the rest of the article is behind a paywall. The freely readable part says the pandemic had forced the company to shift to B2B sales and the public sector, and that it had landed the City of Helsingborg as a customer.

The product did survive, under another name. Haccess describes itself as a Swedish accessibility data company with Archambeaud as founder and CEO, and its site footer gives Haccess AB, org. no. 559465-0623, at Hillarpsvägen 196 in Båstad, the address Ratsit also lists for the bankrupt company. Ratsit shows Haccess AB registered on 21 December 2023, its current name registered on 22 August 2024, and Archambeaud as the controlling beneficial owner. The Haccess login runs on a handiscover.com subdomain, and the Haccess inventory app, published by Archambeaud since January 2024 and last updated in September 2026, is described as an app for "Handiscover Accessibility customers". Whether Haccess bought Handiscover's software, data or customer contracts from the bankruptcy estate is not public.

Haccess is small. Syna reports 2025 revenue of SEK 774,000, a loss of SEK 319,000 and no employees; Ratsit gives the same rounded figures. Its blog published client cases in February 2026 on Kronprinsen, which it says reached a four-star "Excellent" accessibility rating, and Hotel Baia in Cascais, Portugal, after a gap with no posts since October 2022.

The Technology: Accessibility You Can Book Against

Mainstream booking sites let a hotel tick a box marked "wheelchair accessible". Handiscover's argument, set out in its CORDIS proposal summary, was that this is useless for many travellers: one step is no problem for a manual wheelchair user with a companion and a serious barrier for someone alone in a motorised chair. It assessed properties with a detailed questionnaire, classified them by level of mobility, and checked the data remotely, so users could filter by their own needs. When it raised $700,000 in August 2018, TechCrunch reported 28,000 classified listings in 83 countries; by May 2020 the company told Tech.eu it had certified 35,000 properties in more than 100 countries.

The business model was commission on bookings, so it depended on volume, as the CORDIS report itself notes. The EIC project was meant to widen the questionnaires to non-motor disabilities, which the company said make up 74% of the segment, and to automate hotel onboarding through a management system so supply could scale.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The pandemic hit on day one. The final periodic report says that "with covid affecting our project from day1", the company adapted the solutions it had planned for travel to "other industries" such as retail and venues. A CORDIS Results in Brief article describes the same shift away from a consumer interface towards selling accessibility data to hotels, travel agencies and retailers, including a widget piloted in Swedish shopping centres. The project ended on schedule on 31 May 2022 with, in the report's words, "29 contracts signed representing 445 properties assessed and another 125 to come in June 2022".

1. Assessments for all disabilities, not only mobilityDeliveredQuestionnaires for mobility, visual, hearing and cognitive impairment and allergies, per the CORDIS report; the same five categories appear on haccess.io.
2. Automated hotel registration through a management systemDeliveredThe Accessibility Management System went live for hotels, offices, retail and malls, per CORDIS; Haccess still sells it.
3. Consumer iOS app, expected August 2022Not foundNo Handiscover consumer app is public; the only app found is the Haccess inventory tool for business customers, released in January 2024.
4. Scale up supply and bookingsPartly445 properties assessed under 29 contracts by May 2022; net sales stayed at SEK 0.3M in 2021 and SEK 0.5M in 2022.
5. €37M cumulative revenue and 74 new jobs by 2026MissedStaff peaked at 16 in 2021; the company went bankrupt in May 2024.

On the technology, the project did what it said, on time. On the market, it did not: the proposal's forecast of €37 million in cumulative revenue and 74 new jobs by 2026, recorded on CORDIS, was never in reach of a company whose net sales were below SEK 1 million in every filed year.

The Money

The blended finance award did deliver equity. On 16 June 2021 Handiscover announced in a press release that it had raised "a further €1.65M funding from the EU's European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund and exisiting investors", naming Howzat Partners, Almi Invest and Tranquility Capital among its private backers. ShortTermRentalz reported the round as €1.5 million (SEK 15 million) from the EIC Fund; the two figures do not match, and the EIC Fund's own share was not published. Handiscover does not appear on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, which named 326 organisations across 17 pages when checked for this article.

The filed accounts, summarised by Ratsit, show a company that lived on grants and investors. In 2022 it reported total operating income of SEK 6.2 million, but net sales were only SEK 0.5 million; the rest was SEK 4.2 million of other operating income and SEK 1.4 million of capitalised development work. Syna and Kreditrapporten give 2022 revenue as SEK 4,733,000, a figure that leaves out the capitalised work; Newsworthy puts net sales at SEK 496,000. All three agree on the 2022 net loss of SEK 12,656,000. At the end of 2022 equity was negative at SEK -16.2 million, against long-term liabilities of SEK 20.9 million and total assets of SEK 6.0 million, according to Ratsit.

Why Europe Should Care

The problem Handiscover worked on has not gone away. The Commission's Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021-2030 counts 90 million people with a disability in the EU and calls accessibility "an enabler of rights, autonomy and equality". The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 to services such as e-commerce and passenger transport, which must inform travellers about the accessibility of the built environment. Its requirements for buildings are optional: Article 4(4) lets member states decide whether the built environment used by clients of covered services must meet them.

That leaves accessibility data about hotels and venues largely voluntary, which is the gap Handiscover tried to fill and the reason its revenue depended on property owners choosing to pay. The pivot from consumer bookings to B2B software was a sensible response to a pandemic that stopped travel, but it did not produce enough sales before the money ran out.

The Verdict

Handiscover's founder, its bankruptcy trustee and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.