Israel’s Evinced raises $17 million in series A round led by M12 and BGV

Israeli software company Evinced Inc. announced Wednesday that it has raised $17 million in a series A round, which was jointly led by M12 Partners, Microsoft’s investment arm, and BGV, with the participation of Capital One Ventures and seed investor Engineering Capital. The new capital brings Envinced’s total money raised to $19.5 million. The company, which is headquartered in Tel Aviv, employs 10 people and plans to double its workforce during the course of 2021.

Evinced was founded in the summer of 2018 by CEO Navin Thadani and CTO Gal Moav. The two met during their joint work at Ravello Systems Inc., a startup that was founded by serial entrepreneurs Rami Tamir and Benny Schnaider and sold to Oracle in 2016. Thadani was a part of Ravello Systems’ founding team, and after its acquisition served as VP of Product Development at Oracle. Tamir and Schnaider are also among Evinced’s earliest investors. Tamir sits on Eveniced’s board of directors, and Thadani has invested in Tamir and Schnaider’s other startup Salto.

According to World Health Organization statistics, over one billion people in the world suffer from some form of disability, something that exemplifies the importance of digital accessibility. During the past five years, the issue of digital accessibility has taken center stage and become the focus of many companies, organizations, and businesses. The rapid rate of development on one hand, and the need to transition from manually sorting through lines of code on the other, make accessibility in development work particularly challenging. The capital from the current round will be used by Evinced to accelerate the development of their product portfolio which is designed to address those challenges.

Today many organizations and companies worldwide invest millions of dollars every year in order to digitize their assets so that they will be accessible but confront endless challenges, including exposure to lawsuits, which stems from the lack of suitable development tools. Evinced has built a technology that enables automatic identification of accessibility issues during the course of development, and offers coding changes to fix those issues at earlier stages. With the assistance of Evinced’s technology, many organizations can ensure actual accessibility on phones and on web servers and improve their compliance with regulatory requirements in regard to accessibility, while lowering the high costs and shrinking their exposure to legal liabilities.

“The root cause of accessibility problems is the fact that large parts of the web are not machine-readable; instead, they were designed for visual consumption. Evinced has developed technology that visually analyzes websites and applications, builds a structural-semantic model, and then compares it to the actual code to detect potential accessibility issues. This fundamentally new technology approach enables us to significantly outperform legacy approaches,” said founder and CEO Navin Thadani. “We're exceptionally motivated to bring accessibility to all and are humbled to have the support of investors and partners such as M12, BGV, and Capital One Ventures as it is a testament to our core mission.”

“With over one billion people globally living with a disability, corporations need to ensure the accessibility of digital properties so that all customers can access their products and services,” said Global Head of M12 Nagraj Kashyap. “Building accessible code is the right thing to do, and it’s also good for business. Evinced has a unique technology approach that will enable enterprise developers to weave accessibility into their software development process, and ultimately, engage more customers.”

“Evinced is radically innovating the emerging field of digital accessibility,” said Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner, BGV. “Evinced and digital accessibility is part of our global thesis aligning with Enterprise 4.0 and our focus on deep technology providing access to billions of people. We believe Evinced is revolutionizing and is poised to become a category leader in digital accessibility.”