Adaptation Ventures is a new angel investor group focused on disability and accessibility tech

The worldwide assistive know-how market was valued at greater than $22 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow substantially by 2030. Regardless of the potential market dimension, many founders constructing tech to assist individuals with disabilities wrestle to safe the form of early funding wanted to get their firms off the bottom within the first place.

Adaptation Ventures is a brand new angel group hoping to fill that funding hole by offering capital to early-stage startups constructing accessibility tech. It would again startups constructing tech particularly for individuals with disabilities in addition to firms with merchandise designed for a broader market that additionally helps these populations.

The agency was co-founded by married couple Brittany Palmer and Wealthy Palmer (pictured above), each of whom are former startup founders, angel buyers, and individuals with disabilities.

Brittany advised TechCrunch she skilled this funding hole downside firsthand when she tried to lift capital for her firm Beeyonder, a startup that provided digital journey experiences to individuals with disabilities.

“Enterprise capital companies actually didn’t perceive the incapacity neighborhood, or how large it was, or the alternatives to promote to them,” she stated. “Once I was speaking with founders within the incapacity tech house, there was an identical kind of consensus that lots of people within the startup and enterprise world actually didn’t perceive the house.”

Wealthy, the previous co-founder of Gravyty, discovered the identical sentiment whereas he was engaged on the investing facet as a managing director, after which angel investor, at Launchpad Enterprise Group, an angel investing group targeted on tech and science-based startups.

“We knew this chance existed,” he stated. “We have been assembly unbelievable founders, and attempting to determine one of the simplest ways to get capital to them.”

Regardless of the couple’s angel investing expertise, they initially got down to increase a standard enterprise fund and pitched quite a few LPs, together with affect buyers and high-net-worth people. Whereas they did see some traction on their unique fund thought, a few of that curiosity dried up alongside the altering narratives within the trade, and past, surrounding range, fairness, and inclusion that got here with the brand new presidential administration.

In addition they discovered that high-net-worth people have been extra excited about getting instantly concerned with the startups on this house, versus serving as LPs in a fund, and so they began to consider constructing an angel group as a substitute.

“We’ve each benefited from angel buyers who took early bets on us,” Wealthy stated. “We’re each individuals with disabilities. We went out and we’re studying that, , there are not any angel teams on this house. There’s no first cash in that’s serving to firms get from level A to level B and it’s loopy.”

Adaptation Ventures plans to take a position a minimal of $250,000 into every firm with the choice for co-investing too. The group will maintain quarterly conferences that embody a minimal of 4 pitches and buyers will vote on which firms ought to make it to the due diligence stage, Brittany stated.

There are a number of potential firms that fall below the group’s funding technique which Wealthy described as, making the massive stuff smaller and the costly stuff cheaper.

Firms that match the group’s thesis may embody one thing like ReBokeh, an organization that builds assistive know-how for individuals with low imaginative and prescient. It additionally contains firms that aren’t targeted on accessibility, however may also assist these with disabilities like Tonal, Wealthy talked about for example, which makes exercising extra accessible to these with disabilities that stop them from holding bodily weights.

Wealthy joked that with the pair’s collective a long time of expertise within the startup and investing world, they’ve been training for this new position for the final 10 years.

“I’m a mind aneurysm survivor,” he stated. “I’ve had short-term and everlasting disabilities on account of that. [Brittany] is a bilateral amputee. It’s exhausting to not discover this stuff or hear this stuff about us. So we’ve attracted founders on this house and invested as angels for the previous a number of years. The percentages are form of towards you getting that funding, and so we nearly needed to do it.”