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Startup uses AI to scan company websites for flaws in their accessibility to people with disabilities. The round comes as the field is increasingly drawing interest from venture capital
Evinced Inc., a startup that aims to help companies make their websites and software accessible to people with disabilities, has raised $17 million in Series A funding.
The round, which brings the company’s total funding to $19.5 million, was led by Microsoft Corp. venture fund M12, Benhamou Global Ventures and Capital One Ventures, the venture fund of Capital One Financial Corp. , which is a customer of the software company. Seed investor Engineering Capital also participated.
The round closes as customers and disability activists increasingly pressure companies to make the web accessible to all users, including people who are blind and use screen readers, and those with motor difficulties who rely on a simplified keyboard setup.
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 didn’t explicitly address the digital space. But plaintiffs have in recent years interpreted the legislation to successfully sue corporations for failing to make their websites, apps and other software accessible to all.
Guillermo Robles, who is blind, in 2016 sued Domino’s Pizza LLC after he was unable to order from the chain online using his screen-reading software. In 2019, the Supreme Court denied Domino’s petition to hear whether its online platform is legally required to be accessible, allowing Mr. Robles’ suit to proceed to trial, Domino’s said.
Building accessible websites can also help companies increase sales, said Gina Bhawalkar, a principal analyst at the research firm Forrester. People with disabilities collectively harbor more than $1 trillion of annual disposable income world-wide, she said.
“When you start to expand that to include the friends and family members of people with disabilities—who, we know from research, prefer to do business with brands that care about accessibility—then you’re talking about over $8 trillion,” Ms. Bhawalkar said.
Evinced, which is based in Los Altos, Calif., uses artificial intelligence to help detect aspects of a website that aren’t accessible to people with varying disabilities. Customers can license its products to help build new digital platforms, or check existing ones for accessibility compliance, said Navin Thadani, co-founder and chief executive.
Some businesses choose not to invest in digital accessibility because they feel it slows down product development, said Graham Johnson, the chief product officer at marketing group FCB Health Network, who last month issued a companywide internal accessibility mandate urging staffers to examine accessibility on the network’s own websites and encourage clients to consider accessibility.
Companies that pursue the issue often employ consultants to manually check digital platforms for varying user needs, sometimes using a patchwork of tools to scan for basic accessibility snags in existing websites. But they often miss more subtle issues, Mr. Johnson said. These include the quality, richness or accuracy of an image’s alternative text, which describes an image for people using screen readers, he said.
Software that speeds up a detailed accessibility assessment could begin to grow on the same trajectory as enterprise cybersecurity or privacy technology, which both became lucrative industries once their services were automated, said Nagraj Kashyap, global head of Microsoft’s M12.
“If you look at manual or consulting-led solutions, those never scale,” Mr. Kashyap said. “Accessibility is one of those things where there’s so far never been a great, technology-led solution.”
Other companies that offer digital accessibility compliance technology have also found investors. AccessiBe Ltd., a Tel-Aviv-based company that uses machine learning and computer vision technology to scan for and remediate accessibility issues, last year announced it had secured $12 million in funding led by investment firm K1 Investment Management and next week plans to announce a further funding extension that will bring its Series A round to more than $25 million, said Nadav Dakner, a company spokesman.
EqualWeb Ltd., also based in Israel, offers businesses monthly and annual subscriptions to its accessibility compliance technology. The company said it plans to follow its $500,000 seed capital funding round with Series A financing later this year.
But companies must not do away with humans entirely if they want to guarantee accessibility online, Forrester’s Ms. Bhawalkar said.
“A tool can help get you to a compliant experience, but it can’t get you to a great experience,” she said. “Getting accessibility right means engaging people with disabilities—the people that the guidelines are intended to help—in the design process itself.”
