 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Web accessibility |
| Founder | Dekel Skoop, Gal Vizel, Shir Ekerling |
| Headquarters | New York, , New York |
| Products | Web accessibility softwares |
| Website | accessibe |
accessiBe is a technology company working to solve challenges of web accessibility through AI. [1] [2] The company has raised $58 million in two rounds of funding. [3] [4] [5] [6]
accessiBe was founded in 2018 by Dekel Skoop, Gal Vizel and Shir Ekerling. [7] [8] The founders worked on developing proprietary software in order to make websites accessible for people with disabilities. [9] [10] [11]
accessiBe launched its flagship product, accessWidget, as a tool that scans and attempts to remediate websites in real-time, attempting to achieve ADA compliance through implementing WCAG 2.1 guidelines. [12] [13] The product claims to make website publishers ADA compliant within hours of deploying accessiBe's code, so that people with disabilities can easily access and interact with these websites. [14] [15] In 2021 accessiBe added to its ecosystem of tools, accessFlow, [16] a testing and remediation platform for developers on the source code level.
accessiBe first raised $500,000 from private investors including Nadav Dakner, Elad Mor, Itai Elizur, Oron Yaffe. [17] In May 2020, the company raised $12 million in Series A funding from K1 Investment Management. [18] [19] [20] [21] In February 2021, closed its series A funding with $28 million from K1 Investment Management, a Los Angeles-based private equity firm investing primarily in software and technology private companies across North America, took a minority stake in accessiBe Systems Ltd. with intentions to help accessiBe to expand in North America. [1] [22] [23] [24]
By February 2021, accessiBe's annual recurring revenue has shown a growth of more than 3.5x in 12 months, which led to additional funding from K1, totaling $28 million. [25] Company leaders have announced that they are planning to use the funds to significantly expand its US presence, grow its R&D department and continue educating the market on the importance of web accessibility. [26] [27]
In August 2022 accessiBe raised an additional $30 Million as an extension to its previous Series A [6] [28] bringing its total funding to $58 Million.
Many web accessibility experts agree that accessibility overlay software like AccessiBe can actually cause accessibility issues and create a false sense of accessibility for their clients. [29]
Many industry professionals have criticized the entire product category. [35] [36]
As of 2020, there have been around 100 lawsuits against companies after they invested in a widget-based solution, [37] most prominently ADP, [38] and two have named accessiBe specifically: Thomas Klaus and Robert Jahoda v. Upright Technologies, [39] and Kolesar v. Bylt, LLC. [40]
In January 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million (subject to a thirty day finalisation period) due to misrepresentation that its software could make any website compliant with WCAG, and ordered it to stop making any such claims. It also ordered accessiBe to make clear any material connection reviewers and endorsers have to their products. [41]
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 or ADA is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability. It affords similar protections against discrimination to Americans with disabilities as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin, and other characteristics illegal, and later sexual orientation and gender identity. In addition, unlike the Civil Rights Act, the ADA also requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities, and imposes accessibility requirements on public accommodations.
Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible developments ensures both "direct access" and "indirect access" meaning compatibility with a person's assistive technology.
Web accessibility, or eAccessibility, is the inclusive practice of ensuring there are no barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to, websites on the World Wide Web by people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, more users have equal access to information and functionality.
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and application development.
Accessible tourism is the ongoing endeavor to ensure tourist destinations, products, and services are accessible to all people, regardless of their physical or intellectual limitations, disabilities or age. It encompasses publicly and privately owned and operated tourist locations. The goal of accessible tourism is to create inclusivity of all including those traveling with children, people with disabilities, as well as seniors. This allows those with access requirements to be able to function as an independent using products following the universal design principle, a variety of services, and different environments.
Box, Inc. is a public company based in Redwood City, California. It develops and markets cloud-based content management, collaboration, and file sharing tools for businesses. Box was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith. Initially, it focused on consumers, but around 2009 and 2010 Box pivoted to focus on business users. The company raised about $500 million over numerous funding rounds before going public in 2015. Its software allows users to store and manage files in an online folder system accessible from any device. Users can then comment on the files, share them, apply workflows, and implement security and governance policies.
Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is a global venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional operating funds in London, and India.
Canva is an Australian multinational software company that provides a graphic design platform that provides tools for creating social media graphics, presentations, postcards, promotional merchandise and websites. Launched in Australia in 2013, the service offers design tools for individuals and companies. Its offerings include templates for presentations, posters, and social media content, as well as functionalities for photo and video editing.
Brandlive is a Software as a service (SaaS) company based in Portland, Oregon, USA.
WalkMe Ltd. is an American multinational software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, with headquarters in San Francisco, California. Its digital adoption platform (DAP) was recognized in Everest Group's PEAK Matrix Assessment of DAP vendors as the leading DAP product. Alongside its headquarters in San Francisco, the company has offices in Raleigh, North Carolina; Tel Aviv, Israel, and a global footprint including the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan.
Alteryx, Inc. is an American computer software company based in Irvine, California, with a development center in Broomfield, Colorado, and offices worldwide. The company's products are used for data science and analytics.
Sprinklr is an American software company that develops a software as a service (SaaS) customer experience management (CXM) platform. The company's software, also called Sprinklr, combines different applications for social media marketing, social advertising, content management, collaboration, employee advocacy, customer care, social media research, and social media monitoring.
HealthifyMe is an Indian digital health and wellness company, which provides an app with services such as calorie tracking and advice on nutrition and fitness. It is available on the Android and iOS platforms, and can be used with wearable technology such as activity trackers.
Accessibility apps are mobile apps that increase the accessibility of a device or technology for individuals with disabilities. Applications, also known as, application software, are programs that are designed for end users to be able to perform specific tasks. There are many different types of apps, some examples include, word processors, web browsers, media players, console games, photo editors, accounting applications and flight simulators. Accessibility generally refers to the design of products and environments to be usable by people with disabilities. Accessibility apps can also include making a current version of software or hardware more accessible by adding features. Accessibility apps aim to reduce barriers to technological goods and services, making them more usable for various groups within society. A basic example is that a person who experiences vision impairments is able to access technology through enabling voice recognition and text-to-speech software.
The physical accessibility of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA)'s public transit network, serving the New York metropolitan area, is incomplete. Although all buses are wheelchair-accessible in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), much of the MTA's rail system was built before wheelchair access was a requirement under the ADA. This includes the MTA's rapid transit systems, the New York City Subway and Staten Island Railway, and its commuter rail services, the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) and Metro-North Railroad. Consequently, most stations were not designed to be accessible to people with disabilities, and many MTA facilities lack accessible announcements, signs, tactile components, and other features.
Peak is an artificial intelligence company headquartered in Manchester, UK. It was founded in 2015 and has additional offices in Jaipur, India, and New York City, United States. It is known for its artificial intelligence platform, a SaaS platform that allows data scientists to build AI workflows, invoke them on ingested data and expose the results via APIs and/or built-in web applications, as well as abstracting the underlying cloud infrastructure.
Cohere Inc. is a Canadian multinational technology company focused on artificial intelligence for the enterprise, specializing in large language models. Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, and is headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, with offices in Palo Alto, London, and New York City.
Hugging Face, Inc. is an American company incorporated under the Delaware General Corporation Law and based in New York City that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning. It is most notable for its transformers library built for natural language processing applications and its platform that allows users to share machine learning models and datasets and showcase their work.
Userway is a digital accessibility company based in Wilmington, Delaware. The company uses AI and automation in response to legal pressure on companies to make their websites accessible. It is being traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Atlys (/ˈæt.lɪs/) is an online visa processing platform founded in 2021 by Mohak Nahta. The company started operations in San Francisco, California, and is headquartered in San Francisco with offices across Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Dubai, London, and New York. The company acts as an intermediary between travelers and visa embassies to simplify and speed up the visa application process. As of September 2024, Atlys has processed over 1.2 million visas.