Disability tech founders face resource constraints. That’s changing

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.

Other accelerators and funds for entrepreneurs with disabilities, underrepresented founders, or that are focused on assistive or accessibility tech include Remarkable, Multiple, MassChallenge, Enable Ventures, and K Ventures.

Remarkable, the venture division of Australia’s Cerebral Palsy Alliance that operates in the US, offers Launcher, a 12-week pre-accelerator program for early-stage startups to validate and build disability tech solutions.

Remarkable has helped accelerate over 210 startups focused on disability, aging, and health since 2016. Its US accelerator program for startups that are post-product and post-revenue gives founders access to seed funding, mentorship and coaching, and feedback from the disability community. It offers participants $50,000 as a SAFE. Remarkable also has a program called Scaler to support seed- to Series A-stage startups.

Training

For assistive tech-focused founders who are earlier in their journeys, the University of Pittsburgh’s Impact Center offers a multistage training program supported by grant funding from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR).

Most of the program’s participants are individuals or academic teams with NIDILRR funding or small companies trying to secure Small Business Innovation Research grants, according to Jonathan Pearlman, a co-director of the program and a professor in the university’s department of rehabilitation science and technology.

The Impact Center offers programs at three levels, starting with a bootcamp that gives participants an intro to entering the assistive tech market, with support from mentors.

The next level, an 11-week impact program with up to $25,000 in pilot funding available to participants, is focused on customer discovery.

The center’s “accelerate” program gives participants access to customized consulting to help them advance their product or service, and connects entrepreneurs to funding sources like VC firms in the assistive tech space.

The Impact Center facilitates handoffs from their programs to other resources like startup accelerators. Another resource the organization offers, both to program participants and members of the public, is an entrepreneurial support organization map that uses market research data to identify funding sources for assistive tech across the US.

The programs are free and available online. The bootcamp’s offerings are publicly available via Coursera. The center also provides technical assistance to people who reach out via its website, and is building a database of people with disabilities and caregivers who have agreed to participate in market research and focus groups.

Funding

Brittany Palmer, managing partner at pre-seed and seed-stage VC fund Adaptation Ventures, was born with a bilateral, below-elbow limb difference. Before starting Adaptation with her husband, she founded and led Beeyonder, a startup aimed at giving people with limited mobility access to travel experiences.

When she was raising money for Beeyonder, Palmer recalled VC firms telling her that “disability tech was niche.” Despite progress on this front, Palmer still sees disability tech being “very overlooked and underfunded,” with little recognition from investors about the wide range of disabilities affecting more than 15% of the world’s population—and the fact that most of those disabilities aren’t visible.

Adaptation is a sector-agnostic fund focused on startups in the disability, accessible tech, and neurodivergence spaces, investing in hardware and software for companies that have a minimum viable product ready to test.

In May, Palmer launched Ability Lane, an accessible tech product platform to connect investors, startups, and users. Founders can list their products on Ability Lane and indicate whether they’re looking for funding. They can also post surveys to get feedback on their products and submit requests for product testing. These avenues connect them with both prospective customers and investors.

“Sometimes trying to get in touch with the broader community of people with disabilities to get faster feedback, for a lot of people that have various disabilities, there is no central place to find accessible technology and other assistive devices that could be of help to them,” Palmer told us.

“We wanted to try to create a place where they could find all of…the latest and greatest in technology and hardware, and in conjunction with that, help founders broaden their reach and increase their revenue.”