UPDATED 09:30 EDT / DECEMBER 12 2024

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Digital accessibility design startup Evinced raises $55M

Website and mobile application accessibility startup Evinced Inc. said today it has closed on its biggest funding round to date, raising $55 million.

The Series C round was led by Insight Partners and saw participation from previous backers such as M12, BGV, Capital One Ventures and Engineering Capital, as well as a new investor in Vertex Ventures. It brings the startup’s total amount raised to date to $112 million.

Evinced is providing developers with the essential tools they need to make their websites and mobile applications more accessible to people with disabilities. For instance, it can detect and fix features that don’t work very well with a screen reader, or determine if a site or application is inaccessible to someone using a keyboard to navigate it.

Most enterprise software teams struggle to fix accessibility issues because they design their web and mobile-based applications with visual access in mind, which means they’re often not machine readable. Evinced uses artificial intelligence to fix that, visually analyzing websites and application interfaces to create a structural semantic model that can be compared with the underlying codebase in order to identify any problems and suggest fixes.

According to the startup, by automating the detection of accessibility problems in this way, it can save developers hundreds of hours of time that would otherwise be spent finding them manually. It also streamlines the process of fixing those issues.

For instance, once an accessibility issue has been surfaced, developers must then find the root cause of that problem. Evinced simplifies this, automatically highlighting the line or lines of code that are responsible for it. Its software will even generate suggestions for developers to remediate the problem, so they don’t have to create the new code to fix it themselves. It says that accessibility problems will be ranked according to their severity, so teams can focus on the most pressing issues that need to be fixed first.

Some might be forgiven that Evinced is only catering to a very small audience with its accessibility detection tools, but the reality is that every kind of enterprise needs to ensure that people can access their online properties. In the European Union, new legislation will go into effect in June 2025 that legally requires companies and service providers to ensure their web and mobile apps are accessible, while in the U.S., the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 is increasingly being interpreted in light of digital properties, forcing enterprises to think about compliance.

It can be argued that companies also have a moral duty to make their websites and apps accessible, given how the internet has become such an essential part of life. As Evinced points out, there are more than 1 billion people in the world with low vision or hearing issues that could affect their ability to book a hotel online or interact with their bank.

“This funding round is a clear indication that digital accessibility is now a business imperative, not just an option,” said Evinced founder and Chief Executive Navin Thadani.

The company has already made a lot of progress in convincing enterprises of both the need to ensure their websites are accessible, and the fact that it’s offering them the best tools to enable this. It says its customer base now includes financial institutions with a collective $26 trillion worth of assets, five of the 10 largest media firms in the U.S. and the U.K., three of the five-largest business-to-business software-as-a-service companies in the U.S., and three of the 10 largest U.S. healthcare providers.

Evinced said it will use the funding to expand its presence in Europe, grow its global sales and customer success teams, and invest more in research and development so it can enhance the capabilities of its platform, leveraging new technologies like generative AI.

Insight Partners’ Michael Yamnitsky said he’s backing Evinced because it’s unique in embedding accessibility into the software development lifecycle. “It brings an AI-driven platform approach to accessibility management, replacing expensive and tedious manual audits and ad-hoc solutions,” he said.

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