Insights.

Essays, newsletters, and memos on the markets and founders we think about every day.

NewsletterOctober 1, 2026
October 2026 Newsletter
Meta donates AI glasses to every blind U.S. veteran, BCI raises $250M, Hanger and Numotion combine, Adaptation at the UN General Assembly
September was a big month for Meta in our corner of the market. The company spent the month handing out free AI glasses to blind veterans at VFW posts and blindness agencies across the U.S. and at events across Ireland. Then it used its Connect conference to open the glasses to outside developers and announce an FDA-cleared hearing feature. Precision Neuroscience raised $250M for its brain-computer interface, and Fortell raised $163M for AI hearing aids. Hanger agreed to buy Numotion, which brings prosthetics, orthotics, and complex wheelchairs under one owner...
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EssaySeptember 7, 2026
Nine Years
You can't outspend your body. Longevity spending on its own is a position with no hedge.
Imagine this: You are on a stationary bike, deep into interval training, doing the kind of workout doctors and influencers tell you to do. Then you get dizzy, the worst headache of your life starts happening, your vision goes, your hearing dulls, and you begin to slur your speech - losing consciousness as an unexpected brain aneurysm ruptures, mid-pedal, while you are actively trying to add years to your life. You're young, so the initial diagnosis is a migraine and the paramedics drive without their lights on to the regional hospital. The CT scan tells the real story and you are rushed, with everyone around you apologizing, to a different hospital. You remember scribbling to consent to open brain surgery. You don't remember most of what came next. You remember relearning how to walk. Relearning how to talk, how to read, how to string a sentence together in the right order. You had LASIK, but the bleed damaged your occipital lobe causing blurred vision which is disorienting. Despite that, you remember lying in a hospital bed on the Fourth of July, able to see the colors of fireworks through a window, feeling something close to hope for the first time since it all happened...
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NewsletterSeptember 1, 2026
September 2026 Newsletter
Exoskeleton clears the FDA, Talkspace acquired for $835M, Meta donates enough glasses to cover Ireland's entire blind population
August moved a bit slower than July, but was no less impactful. Wandercraft got the clearance it needed for Eve, the first personal exoskeleton built to leave the clinic, and set a commercial launch date for later this month. Meta gave away 15,000 pairs of its AI glasses in Ireland, enough to cover every blind adult the country's leading charity supports. Talkspace was acquired for $835M. And a Wisconsin judge kept a years-long fight over paper ballots moving for voters who cannot vote without assistance...
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NewsletterAugust 5, 2026
August 2026 Newsletter
$52M to decode the brain, The man who made lightning, a DMV win that was personal, 6% of boards are disability led, and more.
July was a full month for the space we cover. Disability:IN published its annual index, with governance numbers we haven't seen before. Neurotech companies raised more capital than in any month we've tracked this year. Apple, Netflix, and Microsoft all shipped new accessibility features, and Microsoft also laid off a large share of the team that had been building accessibility features for gaming. The Justice Department told states that federal disability law does not require them to fund home and community based services. And our own state, Connecticut, agreed to rewrite how it reviews unsafe-driver complaints, after a settlement we describe further down...
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EssayJuly 28, 2026
Compound Interest
Closing the $1 trillion women's health gap
It is 5:22 PM on a Tuesday. Judith is 44. Her mother is three weeks out from a hip replacement and staying in the guest room because the stairs at her mother's house are still too much. Judith's son, Matthew, who is 11 and autistic, needs the same dinner he had last night, plated the same way, or the evening falls apart. At 6:30PM, her husband arrives home after a long day, exhausted. Last night, like many nights before, they took turns tending to a sleepless Matthew. There is a migraine building behind her right eye, the kind she has learned to work through because there is no version of the night where she gets to lie down – her and her husband need to discuss modifications to Matthew's individualized education plan (IEP) before tomorrow's meeting with the school, which they will both need to attend during work hours. She has a pelvic floor referral she has not scheduled, a mammogram she has rescheduled twice, and a note on her phone: "ask doctor about brain fog." At 9:15 PM she opens her laptop to finish a deck for a client and her mother calls out from the guest room, needing help to get to the bathroom...
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EssayJuly 13, 2026
Root Access
Sound reaches the brain and body like nothing else
As a baby, Daniel Kish lost both eyes to a rare cancer. No one taught him what came next. Around age two, on his own, he started clicking his tongue and listening to how the sound bounced back off walls, furniture, and parked cars. By six he was riding a bicycle down his street using nothing but those clicks to know what was ahead of him. Researchers at Western University later scanned his brain while he echolocated and found that the clicks and their echoes were processed in his visual cortex, the same region a sighted brain uses to see. Sound was not standing in for sight. As far as his brain was concerned, it had become sight. Kish went on to become the first totally blind person certified as an orientation and mobility specialist in the United States, and has since taught his click-based technique to more than a thousand blind students across dozens of countries...
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NewsletterJuly 1, 2026
July 2026 Newsletter
A deaf-communication platform raised at a $500M valuation and a Paralympian won a Senate primary. June was a good month for proving that maximizing independence, potential, and dignity can pay.
June was busy. A communication platform for deaf and hard-of-hearing users raised at a $500M valuation, with lessons for startups about regulation and recurring revenue. Hearing care went through a big round of consolidation. Capital kept moving into vision restoration, neuroprotection, and the infrastructure side of home care. A two-time Paralympic gold medalist won a U.S. Senate primary. And we published an essay arguing that when software gets cheap, the physical world, where disability actually lives, gets a lot more interesting...
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EssayJune 15, 2026
Ethereal vs. Material
When software gets easy, hardware gets interesting
A lot has changed since Paul Graham of Y Combinator wrote: Maybe the advantage of software will turn out to have been temporary. Hackers love to build hardware, and customers love to buy it. So if the ease of shipping hardware even approached the ease of shipping software, we'd see a lot more hardware startups. That was 2012, and in comedically ironic form, none other than Sam Altman of OpenAI fame read a draft of that letter. Fast forward to today. For a long time, hardware was where venture enthusiasm went to get humbled. It was slow and expensive. It required tooling, supply chains, inventory, certifications, returns, firmware, and patience. Software could ship on a Friday night. Hardware could get stuck on a boat, fail a drop test, or die in the gap between prototype and production...
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NewsletterJune 3, 2026
June 2026 Newsletter
From World Cup accessibility to AI-powered assistive tools, May showed how inclusive design is moving into the mainstream
Last month made our thesis around tech for maximizing independence and potential feel unusually tangible. You could see it in global sports, where the World Cup is preparing sensory rooms, sign language interpretation, audio description, and haptic experiences for fans at matches. You could see it in major technology companies, where Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Xbox each used Global Accessibility Awareness Day to show how AI can support people in everyday life. You could see it in financing news, where capital continued to move into neuromodulation, Parkinson's, vision restoration, care navigation, and diagnostics. And you could see it in our own writing, where the Curb Cut Effect reminded us that what looks like an edge case is often a concentrated expression of a universal problem...
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EssayMay 20, 2026
Curb Cut Effect
What can look like an edge case is often a concentrated expression of a universal problem.
Most people look at DisabilityTech and see a niche. We see one of the largest overlooked markets in the world, with enough scale to build very large companies on its own. Around 2 billion people globally live with significant disability, and in the United States about 1 in 4 adults has a disability, before even accounting for the way aging expands the need for assistive and accessible products over time. The size of the disability market is only the beginning. The more interesting story is that products built for people with disabilities often reveal something true about everyone else: when you solve a problem under real constraint, you often end up solving a broader human problem in a better way. That is why curb cuts, closed captioning, the electric toothbrush, audiobooks, and other accessibility-driven innovations so often move from adaptation to everyday use...
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NewsletterMay 7, 2026
May 2026 Newsletter
Economics of disability tech, SBIR is back, #1 School for Entrepreneurship, and the strong silent type
April was Autism Acceptance Month – and there has never been a better time to be building, funding, and championing this space. In this newsletter you will find recent funding and acquisition news, a deep look at the economics of disability tech, a major win for early-stage founders in non-dilutive funding, what happened when we showed up at Babson College (ranked #1 in Entrepreneurship for 30 years), and a reflection worth sitting with. 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:...
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NewsletterMarch 31, 2026
March 2026 Newsletter
Disability on the global stage, conferences setting the tone, ADHD + GOAT, and a quarter full of momentum
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. 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:...
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NewsletterDecember 16, 2025
December 2025 Newsletter
The sound of innovation: pitch applications open, growing disabilitytech exposure, Adaptation in the wild, and a bit of Beethoven
As we head into the New Year, we are filled with gratitude that we are able to champion mission-driven founders who bring extraordinary insight to their work – often through personal disability affinity or deep research. Alongside our incredible limited partners and investors, we recognize the potential for fueling innovation that will define the next decade of both scale and impact – and are excited for the year ahead. 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...
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NewsletterSeptember 29, 2025
September 2025 Newsletter
A summer of innovation: notable acquisitions, Adaptation in the wild, and ensuring a bright future
As autumn arrives, we reflect on another remarkable quarter driving progress in disability and accessibility technology. Adaptation Ventures continues to champion a more inclusive world by connecting bold founders, strategic investors, and community leaders to unlock opportunity in the world's largest overlooked market. Adaptation Ventures is a pioneering pre-seed fund dedicated to fueling tech innovation in disability and accessible technology. We're tapping a massive, underserved market and catalyzing venture-scale returns in an $18 trillion market that touches nearly everyone:...
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NewsletterJune 28, 2025
June 2025 Newsletter
The journey begins: launch insights, industry news, a bit of philosophy, events, and a growing movement await.
We are excited to share our first quarterly newsletter with you – investors, founders, and advocates – all working towards a more accessible future. Adaptation Ventures was founded to unleash innovation in the world's largest overlooked market through fueling disability and accessible technology. With your support, we are already making a difference. Adaptation Ventures is a pioneering pre-seed fund dedicated to fueling tech innovation in disability and accessible technology. We're tapping a massive, underserved market and catalyzing venture-scale returns in an $18 trillion market that touches nearly everyone:...
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