About Pelago

About Pelago

Pelago was founded to revolutionize the way people experience the physical world. Whrrl 3, the company’s flagship product, endeavors to end Social Rut, an affliction impacting millions that keeps people from experiencing adventure in their daily lives. Pelago was founded in 2006, is based in Seattle, and led by an executive team from companies including Amazon, RealNetworks and Yahoo. The company is backed by pioneering Internet and mobile investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Bezos Expeditions, T-Venture, Trilogy Equity Partners and Reliance Technology Ventures.

Our Mission

Pelago’s mission is to remove all barriers to information, inspiration and human connection.

We believe the intersection of pervasive location technology and rapid democratization of media creates a platform to inspire, connect and inform people in ways the world has never seen. We at Pelago think this is huge — entirely new classes of applications become possible in this vast new playground for innovators.

We foresee a world in which human behavior in the physical world is digitized, like human behavior on the Web is today.

Why Pelago?

Pelago comes from the word “archipelago,” a cluster of islands. The word archipelago is, in our minds, iconic of the power of knowledge.

Prior to technology that allowed island-to-island communication, inhabitants of two nearby islands were nearly identical (genetically and environmentally) to each other, yet very isolated from one another. Anthropologists found that inhabitants of islands in the same cluster had breakthrough evolutionary moments at different times, and often simply because of luck.

A great example is the science of farming. Farming created leverage whereby one person’s efforts could feed many (vs. the hunting/gathering model).  Time was freed up for focus on other endeavors, which inevitably led in time to inventions such as steel weapons and large sea-worthy boats.

Consider the (historically accurate) scenario where the inhabitants of one island discovered how to farm one hundred years or more before the inhabitants on a sister island.  With the resultant inventions, the “advanced” group was able to become imperialistic, easily conquering their ill-equipped neighbors.

Though tragic, this example shows how a small amount of knowledge can dramatically change the course of human development.