Welcoming Evinced to the M12 Portfolio

By Nagraj Kashyap

I’m excited to welcome Evinced — a digital accessibility company with a mission to help enterprises automate steps to enable access to the one billion people living with a disability — to the M12 portfolio as co-lead of their Series A round.

For the 15% of the global population living with a disability, navigating websites built for abled people can be difficult. Whether an individual has a visual or hearing impairment, different cognitive abilities, or limited control of limbs, there are many circumstances that must be considered in building digital properties for the general population. The Americans with Disabilities Act has put necessary pressure on enterprises to make digital assets accessible, but 98% of webpages still have accessibility issues. As ecommerce has skyrocketed in the wake of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, the importance of web property accessibility has never been more urgent. Coupled with a growing trend in values-aligned consumer buying, building accessible code is the right thing to do, and it’s also good for business.

Digital accessibility is not the by-product of everyday web development practices, and it requires deliberate intervention. Many enterprise-grade solutions on the market today are delivered by professional service providers at high costs and with low levels of automation. And unfortunately, automated SMB solutions don’t always deliver compliant results. Unlike these incumbent offerings, Evinced’s software was built for the DevOps model, providing a shift left solution that offers unmatched automation and integration into current development processes — all without compromising on compliance.

Accessible websites are machine readable, with the correct structure, metadata, and permissions for accessibility tools and plugins to be successfully implemented. Evinced’s solution effectively incorporates accessibility into the code development lifecycle, eliminating a significant portion of manual testing work with deep integration in the existing developer ecosystem. Their three-pronged approach — Detection, Prioritization, and Remediation — traces issues back to root causes and suggests corrective code proactively, eliminating redundant work and empowering stakeholders to be more effective at each phase of the code development lifecycle.

Evinced founders, Navin Thandani and Gal Moav, have been working together for over a decade and have achieved incredible success as serial entrepreneurs, building complex virtualization technology that is the foundation for many public clouds today. Instead of taking the safer route in building on their past successes, they decided to bring their collective capabilities to solve the incredibly hard problem of advancing state-of-the-art in digital accessibility. What’s more, Navin and Gal have first-hand experience living the customer pain point they’re addressing with Evinced: they faced the challenges of retroactive accessibility fitting first-hand while integrating a previous startup into an enterprise acquirer.

Navin, Gal, and team plan to use the funds raised to deploy early versions of the company’s products that already outperform existing solutions by up to 20x. We are excited to support them, alongside BGV, Capital One Ventures, and Engineering Capital. Congratulations to Evinced on this fundraise, and welcome to the M12 portfolio. We look forward to your continued growth.

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