Evinced Secures $55M in Series C Funding to Expand AI-Driven Accessibility Tools

Exclusive: Evinced's $55M C round will help bring its accessibility dev tools (and AI) to Europe

Making sure your software is accessible is fast becoming a must rather than a nice-to-have, and Evinced is one of a wave of startups helping make that happen. The company is about to expand to Europe, where new accessibility regulations are about to take effect, and has raised $55 million to fuel the expansion. Evinced is a suite of tools that integrates throughout the software development stack, making accessibility metrics and solutions available throughout. So when an engineer puts together a UI or component, they don't have to wait the monthly accessibility code review to find out it won't work with screen readers -- Evinced's products monitor the process and flag it, offering options on the spot. As regulations and public sentiment lean toward better accessibility -- an increasingly broad term that encompasses all kinds of disability and access issues -- those who have championed the principle before now are in pole position to grow their business. "The tech trends are in our favor, the legal trends are in our favor. Everyone is realizing this market is real -- and our approach is winning," said Evinced CEO and founder Navin Thadani. He noted that many of the Fortune 500 are Evinced customers. That approach, to be clear, is to integrate closely with developers' existing processes, as opposed to something a little more occasional or hands-off, he said. "We've expanded across the entire development lifecycle: design and development of component libraries, testing, production monitoring -- the whole spectrum." "There are many others that are service-like companies, giving you advice on your programs, devices, products -- some do testing and audits. But nobody is really looking at it the way we are; we are still, at this point, the only pure tech play in the accessibility space," Thadani asserted. At the very least his company is certainly one of the best funded. Evinced raised $17 million in 2021 when it was starting out, then $38 million more in 2022 to build out its tools. And now it has this $55 million C round, led by Insight Partners, with participation from M12, BGV, Capital One Ventures, Engineering Capital, and new investor Vertex Ventures. Thadani was very clear about where this money is going, no doubt to the joy of his investors. "I have a very concrete plan for my company, with three significant areas of investment," he explained. First is research and development, where Evinced is focusing on building out a generative AI product portfolio. Of course, everyone is doing this in a way, but accessibility-focused coding is something that an assistant AI may be genuinely helpful with. Second is "customer success," in other words continuing work with existing clients who need support, new products, and so on. And third is expanding to Europe. "They just passed the EAA, and come June of 2025, it's going to start getting enforced: Anyone doing business in Europe, all your assets need to be accessible. That's huge, obviously a big tailwind for our business," Thadani said. "But a local market is a local market; you have to have sales and support on the ground. Europe is big, and you need to invest properly." Expect adoption of accessibility-focused tools like Evinced to accelerate as companies continue to realize that it's not just the law to build with accessibility in mind, it's just simply a good idea.

Digital accessibility design startup Evinced raises $55M - SiliconANGLE

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.