To view the original post on PR Newswire, please click here.
In addition to funding led by Microsoft’s M12, BGV and Capital One Ventures with participation from Engineering Capital, Evinced launches a complete suite of products
Evinced, an unparalleled accessibility software company specializing in providing automation to enterprise developers, today announced $17 million in funding. This round was co-led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, BGV, and Capital One Ventures along with participation from seed investor, Engineering Capital.
According to the World Health Organization, there are more than 1 billion people worldwide that live with some form of disability, underscoring the critical importance of digital accessibility. In recent years, a rise in web-related lawsuits related to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has put tremendous pressure on enterprises to make their digital assets accessible to people with impairments. Enterprises are developing and deploying software much faster, and the traditional, labor intensive manual audit process isn’t helping teams keep up with the pace. Evinced’s latest funding will be used to accelerate the launch of the company’s suite of products and services aimed to solve this challenge.
“The root cause of accessibility problems is the fact that large parts of the web are not machine readable; instead, they were designed for visual consumption. Evinced has developed technology that visually analyzes websites and applications, builds a structural semantic model, and then compares it to the actual code to detect potential accessibility issues. This fundamentally new technology approach enables us to significantly outperform legacy approaches,” said founder and CEO Navin Thadani. “We’re exceptionally motivated to bring accessibility to all and are humbled to have the support of investors and partners such as M12, BGV, and Capital One Ventures as it is a testament to our core mission.”
“With over one billion people globally living with a disability, corporations need to ensure the accessibility of digital properties so that all customers can access their products and services,” said Global Head of M12 Nagraj Kashyap. “Building accessible code is the right thing to do, and it’s also good for business. Evinced has a unique technology approach that will enable enterprise developers to weave accessibility into their software development process, and ultimately, engage more customers.”
“Evinced is radically innovating the emerging field of digital accessibility,” said Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner, BGV. “Evinced and digital accessibility is part of our global thesis aligning with Enterprise 4.0 and our focus on deep technology providing access to billions of people. We believe Evinced is revolutionizing and is poised to become a category leader in digital accessibility.”
With this funding, Evinced will deploy early versions of its products that already outperform existing solutions up to 20 times, and has production deployments at Fortune 500 enterprise customers such as Capital One.
- Dev Debugger: A browser extension for developers to discover and fix accessibility issues before pushing their code.
- Automation/CI: For automating accessibility testing using existing UI end-to-end tests or instrumenting a dev build for analysis.
- User-flow Analyzer: A browser extension for accessibility engineers and QA teams to detect accessibility issues across end-to-end flows and file bug reports.
- Site Scanner: A SaaS service that crawls and scans entire websites and web applications for accessibility issues, analyzes them and presents actionable results. This product is a free service offered to the community with the intention of promoting accessibility learning for all.
- iOS Accessibility Debugger: An SDK and desktop client that helps detect accessibility issues in native iOS apps and suggests fixes. This is offered as a free product for the community.
“At Capital One, we’re passionate about digital accessibility and committed to making our products and services accessible to everyone,” said Mark Penicook, Director of Digital Accessibility at Capital One. “Technology is essential to delivering accessible experiences and we continually look for the best solutions to support our program. Evinced’s unique technical approach enables us to integrate accessibility earlier in the development cycle, making it easier to design and build accessible assets and maintain that accessibility level over time. It has become the standard accessibility testing and development platform at Capital One, and we’re excited about the innovation Evinced will continue to deliver.”
Enterprises spend millions of dollars every year on making their digital assets accessible – only to fail at accessibility compliance, which stalls the pace of their software development. Evinced has built technology to automatically detect accessibility problems during the development cycle, while suggesting code changes to remediate the issues. Enterprises can now improve accessibility compliance and easily maintain the level over time, all while reducing associated expenses and legal liability. With computer vision, AI, and other algorithms, Evinced has and is building products for enterprise developers to allow them to seamlessly weave accessibility into their software development process, producing naturally accessible code.
