Adaptation Ventures Journal | Issue 04 | Briefing | March 2026

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

As spring starts to thaw, we are struck by the sheer volume of activity in our space – from record-breaking Paralympic viewership to a wave of meaningful funding, and from the halls of Babson College to the stages of SXSW. We’ve spent this quarter heads down and in the arena, and we’re excited to share it all with you.

In this newsletter you will find exciting updates, key highlights from the past quarter, a dose of inspiration, and a sneak peek at what is ahead.

Our Value Proposition

Adaptation Ventures is a pioneering pre-seed fund and investor community dedicated to fueling tech innovation in disability, neurodivergence, and accessibility. We’re tapping a massive, underserved market and catalyzing venture-scale returns in an $18 trillion market that touches nearly everyone:

• 2 billion people live with disabilities globally, and nearly everyone will use adaptive technology at some point in their lives
• $18 trillion in disposable income is controlled by people with disabilities and their supporters, who have a much higher customer lifetime value and brand loyalty than average
• For every $1 spent on assistive tech, there is a 9x ROI as people gain independence and potential, engage in activities, excel at work, raise families, and more
• The assistive tech industry alone is projected to be $112B by 2034.

Disability On the Global Stage: Milano Cortina 2026

The Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games in Milan and Cortina were not just about dedication and excellence in sports – they were a landmark moment for disability representation and visibility that we haven’t seen before.

The Olympics: Athletes Who Changed the Conversation

This year’s Winter Olympics featured a remarkable cohort of athletes whose disabilities, neurodivergence, and identities became a central part of the story:

• Florence Brunelle – The 22-year-old Canadian short-track skater, born with a limb difference on her left hand, helped Canada win silver in the mixed relay. After years of hiding her hand, she chose unapologetic visibility on the world’s biggest stage.
• Jasper Fleming – The 20-year-old Canadian biathlete made his Olympic debut after publicly sharing how his severe dyslexia became the “superpower” that rewired how he learns and competes.
• Yelizaveta Nopriienko – The Ukrainian cross-country skier who is deaf, competed in four separate events at the highest level of the sport, while navigating communication and coordination challenges that hearing athletes never face.
• Elana Meyers Taylor – The 41-year-old U.S. bobsledder won her first Olympic gold medal, becoming the oldest American woman to win individual gold at the Winter Olympics and tying Bonnie Blair’s record for most Winter Olympic medals by a U.S. woman (6). When she found out she’d won, she celebrated by signing “Mommy won” in ASL to her two deaf sons – a moment seen around the world.

The Paralympic Games: Record-Breaking in Every Direction

The Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games were the best on record – from the breathtaking opening ceremonies right up until the very last competition.

• 22.7 million total viewers – up 90% from Beijing 2022 (11.9M) and 47% higher than Paris 2024 (15.4M)
• The Games were also the most-streamed Winter Paralympics of all time, nearly 100 million total streaming minutes – five times as many as Beijing
• Digital viewership was four times higher than all prior Winter Paralympics combined
• A single Para ice hockey match between the U.S. and Italy drew 8,992 fans – setting a new all-time attendance record for the sport at a major tournament

Beyond the numbers, the Games made accessibility a design principle, not an afterthought. For the first time in Olympic and Paralympic history, the ticket purchasing process allowed attendees to indicate an intellectual or cognitive disability, unlocking accommodations like quiet zones, noise-canceling headphones, and identification lanyards. The Sunflower lanyard program – for people with invisible disabilities (which is 80% of all disabilities) – was available at all venues. Over 18,000 volunteers were trained on accessibility and inclusive practices. More than 850 Samsung Galaxy devices embedded with real-time Interpreter AI translation technology were deployed across the Games, helping deaf and hard-of-hearing spectators, athletes, and officials communicate seamlessly.

The host cities invested over €75 million in permanent accessibility infrastructure – subway upgrades, venue modifications, pedestrian routes – that will outlast the Games themselves. Milano Cortina didn’t just host the Paralympics. It built a legacy and model worth adopting.

Conferences: CES, SXSW, and CSUN

The first quarter is conference season in our space, and 2026 did not disappoint. Three major gatherings – CES in January, CSUN in March, and SXSW sandwiched in-between – collectively made the case that disability and accessible tech is no longer a niche category.

CES 2026: Exciting Accessibility Innovation

140,000+ attendees and 3,500+ exhibitors descended on Las Vegas in January, and CES featured a standout class of accessibility and assistive tech innovation – on a dedicated accessibility stage – including:

• Hapware – Facial recognition and social understanding for visually impaired and neurodivergent users, with 95% accuracy
• Strutt EV – A smart mobility chair using Co-Pilot AI technology to sense its full environment, makes continuous real-time adjustments, and responds to natural language voice interactions.
• NaviCane – An AI-powered smart cane for visually impaired users delivering precise environmental analysis through multi-sensor fusion, edge AI, and tactile feedback.
• Mand.ro Mark 7X – A wrist-enabled prosthetic hand with integrated two degrees of wrist motion, providing more natural upper-limb functionality in daily life.
• .lumen glasses – A wearable AI device for blind users that detects safe walking paths through sensors and haptic feedback.
• WheelMove – A transportable, quick-install power-assist device for manual wheelchairs providing all-terrain support for up to 15.5 miles on a single charge.
• HyperShell X Ultra – An AI-powered exoskeleton that boosts walking endurance for users with mobility challenges.
• Naqi Logix Neural Earbuds – Earbuds that allow users to control devices using subtle micro facial movements

The breadth of this list speaks to an accelerating trend: the integration of AI and sensor technology is unlocking a new generation of assistive devices that are lighter, smarter, and more intuitive than anything that came before.

SXSW 2026: Brittany on Stage, Disability Tech in the Spotlight

SXSW drew 300,000+ attendees to Austin in March, and the Healthcare, AssistiveTech & BioTech category of the SXSW Pitch competition featured 5 companies competing.

This year’s winner in the Healthcare, AssistiveTech & BioTech category was Surgicure Technologies, whose horseshoe-shaped airway securement device is designed to reduce unplanned extubations and improve patient safety. Other finalists included ATDev, a robotics startup developing the Reflex rehabilitative robot for individuals with mobility challenges. The Best Inclusivity award went to Rea Diagnostics SA, and OneCourt won the Sports and Entertainment category.

We were proud to have Brittany on the SXSW stage as a moderator for the Healthcare, AssistiveTech & BioTech competition – helping shine a light on some of the most compelling founders we’ve seen this year.

CSUN 2026: The World’s Largest Assistive Tech Conference

The 41st Annual CSUN Assistive Technology Conference – the world’s longest-running and largest AT conference – was held March 9-13 in Anaheim, drawing 4,500+ professionals, researchers, practitioners, educators, government representatives, and end-users. AI was the undeniable throughline. Highlights included:

• Dot Inc. – Showcasing its AI-powered Braille display technology
• Luna low-vision / night-vision glasses – Enabling independence for users with visual impairment
• Be My Eyes – Demonstrating its AI visual assistance tools in real-world use cases

CSUN continues to be the gathering place for the people building the future of assistive tech. The depth of representation – from early-stage startups to enterprise accessibility teams – is unlike any other conference in our space.

Funding Rounds & Acquisitions

The market continued to validate our thesis in Q1 – capital is beginning to flow to disability and accessible tech in a serious way.

• AnswersNow Raises $40M Series B. AnswersNow, the leader in virtual Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) therapy for autism, closed a $40M Series B led by HealthQuest Capital, with participation from Left Lane Capital and Owl Ventures. The company’s AI-enabled model connects families with Board-certified behavior analysts for highly personalized 1:1 virtual therapy – achieving clinically proven outcomes in roughly one-sixth the therapy hours of traditional in-person ABA and up to 75% reduction in total care costs.
• Spring Health Acquires Alma. Spring Health, which supports more than 50 million lives through employer and health plan benefits, entered into an agreement to acquire Alma, the platform that enables independent mental health clinicians to accept insurance and build sustainable practices. The combined entity is expected to be valued at $6 billion and would become the first lifelong mental health platform.
• Wheel the World Raises $11M Series A. Wheel the World closed an $11M Series A co-led by Enable Ventures and Kayyak Ventures, with participation from former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford and former Booking.com CEO Gillian Tans. The company is building the accessibility data layer for global travel, verifying accessibility for 4,000+ hospitality businesses across 80+ destinations.
• First Assistive Tech Fund in Africa. AT4D and the Judith Neilson Foundation launched a $500,000 Momentous Pilot Fund for early-stage assistive technology startups across Africa – the first fund of its kind on the continent. We are proud of Bernard and his colleagues!

Announcements & News

Corporate initiatives, cultural spaces, and design toolkits continue to accelerate progress in digital accessibility and disability inclusion both online and offline, setting new benchmarks for innovation.

• Google Introduces Natively Adaptive Interfaces (NAI). Google Research introduced Natively Adaptive Interfaces (NAI), a framework that embeds accessibility directly into the core of product design using multimodal AI agents that adapt in real time to each user’s abilities and context.
• Museum of Disability History Opens on Long Island. On February 17, 2026, the Museum of Disability History celebrated its grand reopening at The Viscardi Center in Albertson, New York – the only museum in the United States dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of the disability rights movement. The museum houses over 8,000 artifacts, documents, books, and photographs and is fully wheelchair accessible with captioned video content, assistive listening devices, audio descriptions, and sensory accommodations throughout.
• New Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit. Microsoft released an updated Inclusive Design Toolkit this quarter – a practical resource for designers and product teams building with accessibility in mind from the ground up. The toolkit continues Microsoft’s long-standing leadership in accessible design and is a resource we recommend to every founder we work with.

Adaptation in the Wild

While we are largely heads-down, working hard in the background, we want to highlight a few events that were of particular importance to our ability to share the mission and engage with the community.

ASU SCIL Global AI Challenge – Judge
Rich had the privilege of serving as a judge at the Arizona State University SCIL program this quarter for the Global AI Challenge. The quality of ideas and the passion of the builders we evaluated was a clear signal of where the next generation of neurodivergent and disability tech founders is coming from. Winners are going to be announced at ASU+GSV in April.

Thrive Fellows – Georgetown
Brittany and Rich joined the Thrive Fellows program at Georgetown University for a fireside chat with the cohort, sharing the Adaptation Ventures story, the investment thesis behind disability tech, and the unique lens that lived experience brings to building.

Babson College – Standing Room Only
Earlier this quarter, Rich brought Adaptation Ventures’ mission to Babson College for a preview event that was standing room only. Joined on stage by Paul Kent from Disabled Life Alliance and Sara Merion, an investor and Babson alumni – in the middle of a snowstorm – students came out in droves to learn about building disability tech startups and explore the disability community in a way most had never encountered before. The energy in the room was electric.

The event was a lead-up to the Babson Generator Build-a-thon on April 11 – a 12-hour hackathon for 300+ students from across Boston-area universities, sponsored by Microsoft, Lovable, Anthropic, ElevenLabs, OpenAI, and more. Assistive technology is one of the tracks. We are thrilled to support the next generation of builders in this space.

Equitech + The Tech We Want
Much of the action at SXSW happens “off campus” and the Equitech event put on by our friend Laurie Felker Jones, in coordination with The Tech We Want, was the best gathering we attended. More than 150 mission-driven founders, funders, and ecosystem builders came together to help each other tackle some of the biggest challenges facing their ventures – and the world at large. Rich joined one of the fishbowl conversations to talk about the importance of enabling end users to invest in the products and services they want to see, as well as putting stagnant DAF and philanthropic capital to work in venture-scale opportunities – both activities we enable at Adaptation Ventures

To Ponder: The Way of Water

“ADHD taught me to channel
noise into signal”

– Michael Phelps

Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian in history – 28 medals, 23 of them gold. He is also someone who was diagnosed with ADHD as a child and was told in school that he would never be able to focus on anything.

His mother, Debbie Phelps – a teacher herself – became his fiercest advocate. She worked relentlessly with schools to ensure Michael had the support he needed, and crucially, she helped him see what he was good at and build confidence from there. She has said that ADHD “saved” her son – that it forced him to find his lane, both literally and figuratively.

What made Phelps extraordinary in the pool wasn’t just talent. It was the way his ADHD brain worked: the hyper-focus that locked onto the black line at the bottom of the pool and tuned out thousands of screaming fans. The relentless, almost compulsive drive to repeat and refine. The ability to channel adrenaline into precision rather than anxiety. Phelps has said: “I think my ADHD has a superpower.”

We think about this a lot at Adaptation Ventures. How do you help people access their superpowers and their independence? Whether that is a founder that succeeds because of unique problem-solving approaches or unconventional thinking that their lived experiences provides. Or, startups focused on unlocking the potential of someone with ADHD. The constraint isn’t the obstacle. The constraint is the edge.

Our Upcoming Events

If you will be at any of these events, or would like to suggest an event we should attend or speak at, drop us a line.

• Babson Generator Build-a-thon | April 11, 2026 | Babson College, Wellesley, MA | Sponsored by Microsoft, Lovable, Anthropic, ElevenLabs, OpenAI, and more. Assistive technology is one of the tracks for this 300+ student, 12-hour hackathon.
• Taste of Perkins | May 7, 2026 | Perkins School for the Blind, Watertown, MA | An unforgettable evening of gourmet food, cocktails, and musical performances by Perkins students.
• Boston Tech Week | May 26–31, 2026 | Boston, MrA | We will be at the DisabilityTech Investor Summit on May 27th at MassBio.
• UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) | June 9-11, 2026 | United Nations, New York | The 19th session of the Conference of States Parties to the CRPD.

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Thank you for being part of the Adaptation Ventures journey.

Best,
The Adaptation Ventures Team

This journal is for informational purposes only, is not a prospectus, may not be relied on as legal, tax, securities or investment advice and does not constitute an offer to buy or sell interests in Adaptation Ventures Fund I (the “Fund”).