Starting Your Business

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Getty Images / Unsplash

Electric toothbrushes, audiobooks, and text-to-speech tools are just a few of the innovations designed for individuals with disabilities that went on to become successful mainstream products.

More than a quarter of Americans have a disability. And the disability consumer market itself is worth an estimated $675 billion, representing “a staggering revenue opportunity,” according to research by Disability:IN, a nonprofit that works with businesses to advance disability inclusion.

“There are valuable dollars on the table,” Jill Houghton, Disability:IN’s president and CEO, told us, “and if you’re investing in founders with disabilities who are developing products for all, then you’re not leaving money on the table.”

Yet founders with disabilities are 400 times less likely to secure VC funding than their non-disabled counterparts, by some estimates, and receive almost no VC funding despite 1.8 million Americans with disabilities owning small businesses, according to 2Gether-International (2GI).

A growing cohort of business incubators, startup accelerators, and VC firms are working to bridge this gap.

By and for founders with disabilities

“People think [disability tech] is very niche, and it’s actually not,” Diego Mariscal, 2GI’s founder and CEO, told us. “So by focusing on the disability community, we’re actually creating better products and better systems for everybody.”

2GI claims to be the world’s largest startup accelerator run by and for entrepreneurs with disabilities. The 15-year-old organization has supported over 1,300 startups and helped them raise over $84 million. It’s given more than $500,000 in non-dilutive capital to founders with disabilities.

The organization’s offerings, which are free, start with its Get Together platform, which provides an informal space for people to learn about entrepreneurship. Next, 2GI’s Venture Labs focuses on early-stage entrepreneurs at the idea phase. Its MVP Cohort helps founders develop a minimum viable product. From there, 2GI has an accelerator program for more advanced startups.

WhiteFlag App, a peer-to-peer mental health support platform, participated in the MVP Cohort.

“There’s a lot of programs out there that put you in these webinars, send you on your way, and then you don’t hear from them anymore,” Dave Frank, WhiteFlag’s chief content officer, told us. “So it was nice to be a part of this community that was working hard to make sure that the companies and voices they were trying to lift up actually had a leg up in what they were doing.”

2GI is in the process of launching its first-ever fund for founders with disabilities, which will give the organization equity stakes in the companies in which it invests.

Some of 2GI’s programming is open to non-disabled founders who work in the disability space. Otherwise, the programs don’t have requirements around what types of products entrepreneurs develop.

“Rather than trying to fix a disability…what if we could use the resiliency, the creativity, the tenacity that people with disabilities innately have and reframe it as a competitive advantage, and say that founders will be successful not in spite of their disability, but in many ways because of their disability,” Mariscal, who has cerebral palsy, said.

Read more about accelerators and other resources for founders with disabilities.—JG

      

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Growing Your Business

Caraway

Any home cooks worth their kosher salt will tell you they often don’t know exactly what they’re cooking up when they start chopping onions and reaching for pans. And that willingness to improvise and adapt is essential for the companies that make those pans, too.

Just ask Jordan Nathan. In November 2019, Nathan launched Caraway, a DTC cookware brand that promoted its ceramic nonstick products as free of PTFE and other PFAS and embraced on-trend colors. What he couldn’t have predicted was that just a few months later, consumers would be largely confined to their homes, cooking up a storm, and more likely than ever to shop online.

The height of the Covid-19 pandemic “brought the whole category forward,” Nathan told Retail Brew. “I don’t know any brands in the space who didn’t do really well, but being digital-first positioned us versus some legacy brands to capture all the online demand when customers couldn’t go into stores.”

While it started as a DTC brand and enjoyed success in the channel, Nathan knew even in its planning stages that he wanted retail distribution as well.

“We actually intentionally chose to be an omnichannel brand from an early start,” Nathan said, adding that a major reason for this decision was “a lot of purchases in the category are made in the registry process.”

Read more about Jordan Nathan’s plans for Caraway.—AAN

      

Naïve, an AI company that claims to automate the tasks needed to start a business, raised a $28.5 million Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners. Additional investors include Zetta, Liquid 2, and Y Combinator. (TechCrunch)

Pie, a marketing startup focused on small business growth, announced that AmEx Ventures has invested in them for an undisclosed amount. In June, Pie announced a $19.5 million Series A from investors including Capital One Ventures. (Marketing Brew)

Discovery Loop, the AI startup started by former Google AI executives including Jeff Dean, raised a seed fund from investors including Khosla Ventures, Radical Ventures, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Terms of the round were not disclosed. (the New York Times)

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Stat: $4 billion. That’s the value of recorded pledges that the Founders Pledge charity has been promised so far this year, up from $400 million in 2023. Entrepreneurs associated with AI companies have promised to contribute about a third of its lifetime pledge goal. (Wired)

Quote: “In an environment where capital is less free, us old guys are a little bit more attractive.”—42-year-old serial founder Amir Elaguizy, on how founders over 40 are showcasing Silicon Valley’s new “Age of the Unc” (Business Insider)

Read: Storied venture capital firm Sequoia—famous for backing the likes of Apple, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more—looks to expand its investment in AI companies as its two new leaders take the reins. (Bloomberg)

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