New Investment: Stark
We are excited to announce that Indicator recently co-led Stark’s Pre-Seed round of funding alongside Darling Ventures. Other participants include notable angles such as Christina Morgan (Vice Chairman technology at JP Morgan and Fortune’s 50 most powerful women) and an impressive list of tech executives including CTO of GitHub, Accessibility lead at Atlassian, and BD lead at Stripe among others. This was the company’s first round of funding excluding a prior grant from software giant Adobe.
Founded by Cat Noone, Stark helps teams build compliant software products more efficiently. By integrating with the tools that design, engineering and product management teams already use, Stark optimizes workflows through intelligent automation, ensuring teams build products that are usable and inclusive, starting with the visually impaired. The result: significant reduction in cost, time to compliance, financial and legal risk, and a product that can be used by everyone. In a world where accessibility compliance is becoming increasingly more important every day (the global enterprise governance, risk and compliance market is expected to reach nearly $90B by 2027 growing at a 14% CAGR), Stark is the leading software platform that helps teams creating digital products get it right from the start.
Today the product is a basic plugin which integrates with popular design software such as Adobe XD, Figma and Sketch and is already used by over 300,000 design professionals at companies like Uber, Microsoft and Twitter and growing 30% month-over-month with no marketing. The tool allows designers to run a “contrast check” to ensure colors, visuals and typography work hand in hand, providing great readability, legibility and contrast. Stark’s software audits web and mobile design to ensure it’s easy to use for those with visual disabilities. If it detects inconsistencies with standard best practices and ADA guidelines, the tool will automatically replace those designs with the next most similar colors that meet guidelines, making it foolproof to design with compliance in mind. There’s nothing like it on the market today, which may explain why they’ve been able to generate such impressive traction so early and with such a simple product.
Ultimately, Stark’s goal is to save companies time and money while also educating them on compliance best practices, helping to mitigate risk and deliver better digital products. In addition to saving time through better workflow, Stark helps companies save money by eliminating the need for costly compliance consultants — empowering designers, engineers and product managers to take control of the compliance process in a way that seamlessly integrates with the software they already know and love. Stark’s long-term vision is to deliver a must-have platform that seamlessly integrates with all major SaaS tools used in the design and development process. In the near-term Stark is focused on building out further integrations and as the platform grows, offering a tiered subscription fee for access to their suite of design tools. We’re excited to see their further growth as new integrations are released and marketing efforts begin. Moreover, we are thrilled to support a company with such tremendous impact.
To learn more about Stark’s mission and recent fundraise, click here.
