Adaptation Ventures Journal | Issue 12 | Briefing | August 2026

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

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.

In this issue:

• Our value proposition
• Deal of the month: Hemispheric raises $52M to decode the brain
• Funding rounds: BCI takes two thirds of all neurotech capital
• M&A and exits: Cardinal Health buys, LXE Hearing winds down
• Big Tech and accessibility: three launches and one round of layoffs
• Disability on the public stage: the $675B number gets an official source
• From the Journal: Compound Interest
• Close to home: Brittany Palmer’s settlement with the Connecticut DMV
• Mind Over Matter: The Man Who Made Lightning
• Looking ahead to August

Our Value Proposition

Adaptation Ventures maximizes human independence, potential, and dignity by investing in next generation disability, neurodivergence, caregiving, and diagnostic tech companies that serve 2B people with $18T in spending power.

• 2 billion people live with disabilities globally, and nearly everyone will use adaptive technology at some point in their lives
• $18 trillion in annual spending power sits with people with disabilities and their families, who are three times more loyal as customers
• 9x ROI for every dollar invested in assistive technology as people gain independence and potential, engage in activities, excel at work, raise families, and more.

Two July releases gave us better sourcing for the market number. Disability:IN and the American Institutes for Research now put the US disability consumer market at $675 billion, with $107 billion in annual discretionary income concentrated among roughly a tenth of working-age adults with disabilities, who average about $40,000 in discretionary spending each. One caveat worth understanding with that figure: AIR counts only the six categories in the American Community Survey (vision, hearing, mobility, self-care, cognition, and independent living), so most chronic illness and mental health conditions sit outside the estimate. The real number runs higher.

The Global Burden of Disease team also published new numbers this month on the gap between how long people live and how long they live in good health. Global life expectancy rose from 64.6 years in 1990 to 73.8 in 2023, but healthy life expectancy only reached 63.1, so the gap between living and living well widened to 10.7 years. The United States has the widest gap of any country, at 14 years, and for U.S. women it runs 12.1 years against 9.3 for men. Most of the added lifespan medicine has produced over three decades is being lived with a disability, and almost nobody is building for those years.

Deal of the Month: Hemispheric raises $52M to decode the brain

Hemispheric came out of stealth on July 15th with $52 million and Descartes, a six-billion-parameter foundation model for neural data, trained on more than 250,000 hours of recordings from over 100,000 participants. The model itself is the headline, but what interested us more is the input: a fifteen-minute dry-EEG session, no gel, no surgery, no imaging suite. The company has already presented to leadership at FDA’s device center, and co-founder Gidi Littwin co-invented Face ID.

Diagnostic access to prevent disability or understand progress is a cornerstone to our investment thesis, and Hemispheric is an example that a cheaper, faster front door to the brain changes what gets caught and when. Universal Brain made a related case this month, winning FDA 510(k) clearance on July 13th for a dry-electrode EEG cap that produces a neural assessment in under five minutes. The company expects to be in 250 clinics by the end of summer. We don’t know yet which of these companies will matter most. What both point to is a diagnostic process that has often taken a significant amount of time – now reduced to just minutes.

Funding rounds: BCI takes two thirds of all neurotech capital

Brain-computer interface companies have taken roughly $939 million so far this year, about 67% of all neurotech investment, up from 31% in 2024. A few highlights in July:

• RapidPulse closed an oversubscribed $48M Series B on July 16th, co-led by Medtronic, for cyclic-aspiration stroke thrombectomy (Yahoo Finance).
• Hera raised a $27M Series A, led by Bain Capital Ventures, for a virtual care coordination service that handles the appointments, medications, and insurance calls families of older adults get buried under. This touches on many of the topics we describe in Compound Interest: Closing the $1T Women’s Health Gap.
• Bunkerhill Health raised $25M from Khosla on July 16th after growing revenue twentyfold. It runs AI agents over imaging that has already been taken for other reasons, across fifteen health systems, including Cleveland Clinic and Mayo.
• Whispp raised €5M on July 7th from LUMO Labs and the EIC Accelerator. Its on-device model turns whispered or affected speech into a clear, natural voice, and the company is moving toward licensing the technology to device makers.
• Fluent raised A$2M on July 16th for InScribe, a sub-scalp EEG speech interface built for augmentative communication, out of the same Melbourne lab that produced Synchron. First-in-human testing is planned for later this year (NeuroFounders).

On the fund side, Magnify Ventures closed a $46M Fund II on July 1st, with Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures returning as a limited partner. That puts roughly $100M behind the firm across two funds dedicated to the care economy (Fortune). The same day, Cathay Capital launched Ascendia Autism Care across 20 centers, 400 clinicians, and eight states. Sixty autism deals closed in the first half of the year, signaling consolidation despite several states cutting Medicaid rates and capping authorized hours.

M&A, Exits, and Regulatory Approvals

• Cardinal Health paid about $360M in cash on July 20th for AdaptHealth’s Diabetes Health business and Strive Medical. Diabetes Health serves more than 225,000 patients a year, Strive serves more than 20,000, and Strive manages billing across Medicare, Medicaid, and roughly 5,000 private plans. What Cardinal bought at that price is largely the ability to get paid, an issue worth raising with any founder who tells you reimbursement is a problem for later.
• Cortigent is going public through a reverse merger with ClearOne, announced July 2nd. Cortigent is the successor to Second Sight, made the Argus II retinal implant, and is developing Orion, a cortical visual prosthesis with FDA Breakthrough designation. Vivani receives 12.5 million shares for majority ownership, and the companies have filed to raise $10M to $15M alongside a close targeted for the third quarter.
• LXE Hearing began winding down its US operations around July 15th, roughly fifteen months after Eargo and hearX merged with $100M from Patient Square Capital. Support and warranty coverage is guaranteed only through September 15th, which leaves a lot of people holding devices. Direct-to-consumer OTC hearing has absorbed a great deal of venture money without producing a durable standalone business. We would rather say that publicly than pretend the category has nothing to teach us about acquisition costs in this market.

The regulatory approvals got less coverage than the deals and probably matter more. 

• Aurie received FDA de novo clearance back in May, but we thought it was worth highlighting. As the first ever reusable intermittent urinary catheter system to gain clearance through this pathway, it’s a huge milestone impacting people with disabilities who rely on catheters, reduction in infection risk, and mitigation of environmental waste compared to single use incumbents.
• Newronika received the first CE Mark ever granted for adaptive deep brain stimulation on July 14th, stimulation that adjusts to a patient’s own brain signals instead of running at a fixed setting. 
• Science Corporation won EU approval on July 22nd to sell PRIMA, a device that restores vision lost from age-related macular degeneration. One patient in the French trial read a 300-page novel. CEO Max Hodak put the sector’s real problem plainly: what the space needs is a company making $100 million a year in revenue. Maybe him?
• Cochlear cleared the Osia 3, the first fully rechargeable active bone conduction processor, at 30 hours per charge. 
• Neuspera was assigned payment parity with legacy sacral neuromodulation in CMS’s proposed 2027 outpatient rule, at $22,150, an 11.8% increase, in a $1 billion market where fewer than five in a hundred eligible patients currently pursue treatment.

Big Tech and accessibility: three launches, one round of layoffs, product announcements

Apple added Live Recognition in the third iOS 27 beta on July 6th, describing a user’s surroundings through the camera and answering questions about what it sees, on device. The same beta included a Personal Voice framework that third-party developers can build on. If you have money in a paid blind-navigation app, this is worth modeling out. A free OS-level version of the core feature changes what people will pay for.

Netflix commissioned ASL for the first time, launching interpretation across 73 kids and family titles on July 20th with SignUp Media. That is roughly 200 hours of content and 18 on-camera performers, delivered through a free Chrome extension. Captions alone don’t solve this: about 75% of deaf adults read at a fourth or fifth grade level.

Microsoft laid off roughly 1,600 people in gaming, and accessibility absorbed a disproportionate share. The Gaming Accessibility Testing Service, which studios used to validate their work, has effectively gone away, and among those affected were people behind the Xbox Adaptive Joystick and the Gaming Accessibility Fundamentals program. Microsoft says accessibility remains a priority for Xbox. Microsoft has itself put the number of disabled players at 450 million, and there are now fewer people inside the company working on their behalf. This is the risk that comes with accessibility living in a cost center instead of a product line, and it’s one reason we prefer startups whose accessibility work is the revenue.

Anthropic shipped Claude Code’s first accessibility feature on July 14th, an opt-in plain-text mode for screen readers that makes agentic terminal work usable for blind developers who were previously shut out by constant re-rendering (Oday Bakkour). 

On the products side:

• Augmental put MouthPad on public US sale at $1,400 on July 22nd. It is a tongue-driven touchpad from an MIT Media Lab team, requires no surgery, and ships about six months after a dental scan.
• Kalogon launched Verro on July 20th, a 3D-printed variable-density wheelchair cushion that ships in fourteen days and, more usefully, launched into an existing Medicare code, HCPCS E2609. Founders building physical products should look hard at that second decision: designing to fit a code that already exists is years faster than petitioning for a new one. Congratulations to Tim Balz (friend of Adaptation) and the entire Kalogon team on this and their recent Series A!
• Wandercraft named National Seating & Mobility its exclusive complex rehab distributor for the Eve personal exoskeleton, and announced a clinical collaboration with Good Shepherd Rehabilitation on July 23rd, with commercial availability expected later this summer pending FDA clearance.

2026 Disability Index and Policy Updates

Shout out to Reid Jewett-Smith, Jill Houghton, Becky Curran, and all our friends at Disability:IN!

The 2026 Disability Index from Disability:IN came out on July 27th, and it’s the most useful corporate dataset we’ve seen this year. 421 organizations across 45 countries participated, close to a six-fold increase in participation outside the US, filing 627 submissions, and more than 70% of the Fortune 100 now take part. 

On employee-facing practice, the results look genuinely good: 99% offer mental health benefits beyond what the law requires, and 98% offer flexible or remote accommodations. Governance is where it falls apart. Only 6% of participating organizations have a board director who openly identifies as having a disability. Only 25% disclose disability anywhere in governance or ESG reporting. Only 28% name disability in governance documents at all, and only 43% let a candidate opt out of a personality or technical screening. Ted Kennedy Jr., who co-chairs the Index, described the next phase as accountability rather than more programs. We’d point to that 6% figure the next time someone asks why a fund like ours needs to exist and why we insist on playing a governance role with our portfolio companies.

Employment held roughly steady. The employment-to-population ratio for working-age people with disabilities rose from 37.8% to 38.0% in June, while the ratio for people without disabilities slipped from 75.0% to 74.8%. There are now 6,593,000 workers with disabilities, about 4.4% of the US workforce (Kessler Foundation and the University of New Hampshire).

Two policy developments went the other way. On July 20th the Justice Department published notice that its Olmstead guidance is non-binding and unenforceable in Title II enforcement, following a June opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel arguing that federal disability law does not obligate states to provide home and community-based services. Olmstead is the legal ground under the entire community-living services market, and any company whose growth model assumes continued federal pressure on states should test that assumption now, not in a board meeting next year. Separately, 26 former Meta employees filed suit in Oakland on July 14th, alleging the company’s AI-assisted layoff selection disproportionately affected workers with disabilities and workers who had taken medical leave, out of a reduction covering close to 8,000 people. Meta’s response: people made those decisions, not software.

From the Journal: Compound Interest: Closing the $1 Trillion Women’s Health Gap

Our latest essay, Compound Interest, talks about women’s health and disability being the same topics, from two different angles. It opens with a woman we call Judith, 44, raising an autistic son, managing her mother’s recovery from a hip replacement, holding a job, and putting off her own care until something forces the issue, all while the marriage faces considerable strain. She isn’t unusual. Around 708 million women worldwide live with a disability. About 80% of autoimmune patients are women, 81% of caregivers for people with disabilities are women, and one in ten women of reproductive age has endometriosis. In a lot of households, those conditions land on the same person, who absorbs the cost of all of them.

The commercial case follows the overlap. Closing the women’s health gap could add more than $1 trillion to global GDP annually by 2040, and women’s health has already produced $100 billion in exits across 276 events over 25 years, 27 of them above a billion dollars, with $27 billion in exit value in 2025 alone. July added a datapoint we wish we’d had in time to include: the Lancet Haematology Commission reported that women wait 14 to 16 years for a bleeding disorder diagnosis, against roughly two years for men. A delay that long stops being a simple diagnostic issue and becomes a disability in its own right, which is the argument the essay makes at more length.

Read Compound Interest: Closing the $1 trillion Women’s Health Gap →

On the Road, Close to Home: Brittany Palmer’s settlement with the Connecticut DMV

We usually use this space for photos about Adaptation on the road. This month we are sticking with the theme, but want to tell you about something else.

Brittany Palmer, Adaptation Ventures’ Managing Partner, born with a bilateral below elbow limb difference, reached a settlement with the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles, resolving a claim she filed with the state’s Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. The DMV had opened a medical review when she moved her out-of-state license back to Connecticut. The review was triggered by her physical disability and nothing else. It required intrusive medical examinations unrelated to her condition, and it gave her no way to appeal. Connecticut had issued her first license more than twenty years earlier, when she was a teenager, with the same disability she has today, and she has driven safely ever since without accommodations.

The changes the state agreed to are what she was after. An unsafe driver complaint will no longer automatically trigger a medical review. The DMV will now apply an individualized analysis, requiring a sworn affidavit from whoever filed the complaint, a review of the driver’s actual record, and legal review of novel complaints before anything moves forward. Suspension notices have to tell drivers they can appeal and how to ask for more time. The DMV will also consult the Commission on implicit bias and ADA content for its annual anti-discrimination training. Brittany accepted money only to cover the cost of the medical review and her legal fees. She wasn’t looking for a payout – just to ensure that no one else would go through the same situation. In her own words: “What the Connecticut DMV put me through was incredibly stressful and upsetting. My goal was to prevent this from happening to others by ensuring that proper internal policies and driver rights were in place. The settlement represents a giant step towards that, and I applaud the State of Connecticut for recognizing that changes needed to be made.” Her attorney, Sara Bigman of Cohen and Wolf, described the result as one that protects other drivers with disabilities, not only her client. The settlement resolves the matter without any admission of wrongdoing by any party.

We’re including it because the state’s response deserves credit, and that includes the Attorney General’s office, which represents DMV in matters like this and worked the case through to a resolution that changes real procedure rather than digging in to defend the original decision. Connecticut engaged with the complaint, took it seriously, and agreed to rewrite a process that was producing bad outcomes. That’s how this kind of complaint is supposed to get resolved, and it felt worth mentioning since it doesn’t always go that way.

It also sits close to what our founders are up against. The assumption underneath that medical review, somebody looking at a person’s body and deciding what she’s capable of, is the same assumption keeping people with disabilities out of jobs, out of clinical trials, and out of product roadmaps. Brittany spent two years on one instance of it in one agency. Our companies are working on the same problem at scale.

Mind Over Matter: The Man Who Made Lightning

In June 1889, a hunchbacked, nearly penniless German refugee with poor eyesight, almost no English, and an illness at the time of inspection was nearly refused entry to the United States at Ellis Island. His obituary in TIME lists all five grounds officials had for turning him away, and notes he was admitted on the pleas of the friend traveling with him, a man usually identified as Oscar Asmussen. Twelve years later he was president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

Charles Proteus Steinmetz stood about four feet tall and had dwarfism, kyphosis, and hip dysplasia, the same conditions his father and grandfather had. He picked his own middle name at university in Breslau, after Proteus, the shape-shifting sea god who could take any form but always returned to that of a hunchback. By the Smithsonian’s account, he liked the comparison.

Steinmetz with Albert Einstein and others at Marconi wireless station in New Jersey.

His contribution was mathematical rather than mechanical, which is why he’s less famous than Edison – but mattered at least as much. In 1892, he derived the law of hysteresis, which let engineers calculate, for the first time, the power lost to magnetism in a motor or transformer and design around it. The following year, he published a method for using complex numbers to analyze alternating current, turning a problem that required calculus into one an engineer could do with algebra. GE’s own histories concede that nobody understood it at first, and that it took several of his textbooks before the method spread. It’s still taught in every electrical engineering program.

A few details we keep coming back to. General Electric tried to hire him and couldn’t, because he wouldn’t leave the small Yonkers shop that had given him his first job when nobody else would, so GE bought the shop. He believed his condition was hereditary and decided not to have biological children, then legally adopted his adult lab assistant, moved that family into his house on terms the assistant’s wife set, and spent the rest of his life as grandfather to three children who called him Daddy Steinmetz. In 1922, when Edison came to visit and was by then nearly deaf, Steinmetz tapped out a message in Morse code on Edison’s knee, and the two of them held a full conversation in front of reporters who couldn’t follow any of it. No institution arranged that accommodation ahead of time. The two of them simply worked it out on their own, which is a small version of what a lot of our founders end up doing every day.

He also had a view about beauty worth keeping. “Take the rose,” he said. “Most people think it very beautiful: I don’t care for it at all. I prefer the cactus, for the simple reason that it has a more interesting personality. It has wonderfully adapted itself to its surroundings“.

One note for anybody who goes looking. The story where Steinmetz fixes a mysterious problem at Henry Ford’s plant, marks the spot with chalk, and bills $10,000 with a line item of $1 for the chalk mark is almost certainly not true. It traces back to a letters page in Life in 1965, the venue and the amounts change with each telling, and the same story gets told about Tesla. The Edison Tech Center calls it probably apocryphal. The Ellis Island story, which is better, is documented.

Looking ahead to August

August is SMA Awareness Month (spinal muscular atrophy), and Cure SMA makes a practical point about the timing. August is a congressional recess month, the best window in the year for families to reach their representatives at home instead of in Washington. 

August events we’re watching:

• August 1: applications open for the AARP AgeTech Collaborative’s September Open Mic Challenge. The August pitch event is on the 27th.
• August 6 to 23: the world premiere of 504: The Musical at the Denver Center
• August 19: applications close for Breakthrough, the Foundervine and Lloyds accelerator for disabled and neurodivergent founders in the UK, with 25 places and £21,000 in grants
• August 24 to 30: gamescom in Cologne, the largest annual venue for accessibility announcements in games.

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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”).