Accessibility Software Company Evinced Raises $17 Million

By Annie Baker ● Feb 15, 2021
  • Evinced — an unparalleled accessibility software company specializing in providing automation to enterprise developers — announced $17 million in funding. These are the details.

Evinced — an unparalleled accessibility software company specializing in providing automation to enterprise developers — announced $17 million in funding. And 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 over 1 billion people worldwide that live with some form of disability, underscoring the critical importance of digital accessibility. And 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. So 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 round will be used to accelerate the launch of the company’s suite of products and services aimed to solve this challenge.

With this funding round, 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.

Enterprises are spending 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. And Evinced has built technology to automatically detect accessibility problems during the development cycle while suggesting code changes to remediate the issues. Plus enterprises can now improve accessibility compliance and easily maintain the level over time, all while reducing associated expenses and legal liability. Using 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.

KEY QUOTES:

“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. 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.”

— Evinced founder and CEO Navin Thadani

“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. 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.”

— Nagraj Kashyap, Global Head of M12

“Evinced is radically innovating the emerging field of digital accessibility. 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.”

— Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner, BGV

“At Capital One, we’re passionate about digital accessibility and committed to making our products and services accessible to everyone. 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.”

— Mark Penicook, Director of Digital Accessibility at Capital One