Close Menu
TechBrunchTechBrunch
  • Home
  • AI
  • Apps
  • Crypto
  • Security
  • Startups
  • TechCrunch
  • Venture

Subscribe to Updates

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss our latest news

Subscribe my Newsletter for New Posts & tips Let's stay updated!

What's Hot

How to delete 23andMe data

June 14, 2025

New AI-generated tags in the App Store are in beta

June 14, 2025

Investor Experience with TechCrunch All Stages: 1 Floor, Endless Trading Flow

June 14, 2025
Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
TechBrunchTechBrunch
  • Home
  • AI

    OpenAI seeks to extend human lifespans with the help of longevity startups

    January 17, 2025

    Farewell to the $200 million woolly mammoth and TikTok

    January 17, 2025

    Nord Security founder launches Nexos.ai to help enterprises move AI projects from pilot to production

    January 17, 2025

    Data proves it remains difficult for startups to raise capital, even though VCs invested $75 billion in the fourth quarter

    January 16, 2025

    Apple suspends AI notification summaries for news after generating false alerts

    January 16, 2025
  • Apps

    New AI-generated tags in the App Store are in beta

    June 14, 2025

    Google Tests the Audio Summary for Search Queries

    June 13, 2025

    Beyond Bluesky: These are the apps building social experiences on the AT Protocol

    June 13, 2025

    Bluesky Backlash misses points

    June 12, 2025

    Google Cloud Outages bring a lot of internet

    June 12, 2025
  • Crypto

    xNotify Polymarket as partner in the official forecast market

    June 6, 2025

    Circle IPOs are giving hope to more startups waiting to be published to more startups

    June 5, 2025

    GameStop bought $500 million in Bitcoin

    May 28, 2025

    Vote for the session you want to watch in 2025

    May 26, 2025

    Save $900 + 90% from 2 tickets to destroy 2025 in the last 24 hours

    May 25, 2025
  • Security

    How to delete 23andMe data

    June 14, 2025

    Anne Wojcicki's nonprofit reaches a deal to win 23andMe

    June 14, 2025

    Apple fixes new iPhone Zero Day bugs used in Paragon Spyware Hacks

    June 12, 2025

    Researchers confirm that two journalists have been hacked with Paragon Spyware

    June 12, 2025

    US government vaccine websites have been tainted with content generated by AI

    June 11, 2025
  • Startups

    7 days left: Founders and VCs save over $300 on all stage passes

    March 24, 2025

    AI chip startup Furiosaai reportedly rejecting $800 million acquisition offer from Meta

    March 24, 2025

    20 Hottest Open Source Startups of 2024

    March 22, 2025

    Andrill may build a weapons factory in the UK

    March 21, 2025

    Startup Weekly: Wiz bets paid off at M&A Rich Week

    March 21, 2025
  • TechCrunch

    OpenSea takes a long-term view with a focus on UX despite NFT sales remaining low

    February 8, 2024

    AI will save software companies' growth dreams

    February 8, 2024

    B2B and B2C are not about who buys, but how you sell

    February 5, 2024

    It's time for venture capital to break away from fast fashion

    February 3, 2024

    a16z's Chris Dixon believes it's time to focus on blockchain use cases rather than speculation

    February 2, 2024
  • Venture

    Investor Experience with TechCrunch All Stages: 1 Floor, Endless Trading Flow

    June 14, 2025

    New details appear on the scale of Meta's $14.3 billion contract

    June 13, 2025

    Founder Experience at TechCrunch All Stage: Building for those who build the following

    June 13, 2025

    11 startups from YC demo day that investors talk about

    June 13, 2025

    ICONIQ VCS courted the chime for two years and the company has not sold its shares

    June 13, 2025
TechBrunchTechBrunch

How European disability tech startups are using AI

TechBrunchBy TechBrunchApril 30, 20247 Mins Read
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Telegram LinkedIn Tumblr WhatsApp Email
Share
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Telegram Email


While improving the lives of people with disabilities is a laudable goal, accessibility technology has traditionally been unpopular with venture capitalists. In 2022, disability technology companies attracted about $4 billion in early-stage investment, which was only a fraction of the amount invested in fintech.

One reason for this is that disability technology startups are often considered too niche to achieve business viability, at least at the scale that venture capital requires. By definition, these are supposed to be built for minorities. However, some startups in this space are starting to serve more people, and throwing in AI is always helpful.

Both cases require a balance. Without losing sight of your startup's mission statement, the broader business case needs to make sense. On the other hand, passing the due diligence sniff test requires leveraging AI in a special way.

Some accessibility-focused startups understand these needs, and their strategies are worth checking out. Here are four European startups that are doing just that.

visualize

Image credit: Visualfy

Visualfy uses AI to improve the lives of people with hearing loss. The Spanish startup focuses on safety and autonomy, including voice recognition AI that recognizes fire alarms and baby cries in the home. “AI is critical to our business,” CEO Manel Alcaide told TechCrunch last month.

The company offers consumers an app that also serves as a companion to Visualfy Home, a hardware suite consisting of three detectors and a main device. The company has also entered the public sector with his Visualfy Places. It's no coincidence that the startup recently raised funding from Spain's state-owned railway company Renfe.

One of the reasons Visualfy is gaining traction on the B2B side is because of the need to provide accessibility in public spaces, especially when health and safety is at stake.

In an interview, Arcade explained that the devices and PA systems that Visualfy installs in places like stadiums can also monitor air quality and other metrics. In the EU, achieving these other goals could help companies win subsidies while doing the right thing for deaf people.

The latter is still a top priority for Visualfy, as the company is incorporated as a B Corp and employs both normal-hearing and normal-hearing people. Including Deaf people at every step is a moral stance that says “nothing for us without us.” But it's also common sense for better design, Alkaid says.

niceper

Auda Steam – Knisper

Image credit: Audas Technologies

People with complete hearing loss are only a small part of a large and growing group. By 2050, 2.5 billion people are expected to have some degree of hearing loss. Many people do not wear hearing aids for a variety of reasons, including stigma and cost. This is exactly the demographic that his Dutch B2B startup Audus Technologies is targeting with its product Knisper.

Knisper uses AI to make audio more audible in environments like movie theaters, museums, public transportation, and work calls. In practice, this means splitting the audio and mixing it back into a clearer track. This allows anyone to listen comfortably, even without hearing loss, without increasing background volume noise (something not all hearing aid companies can say).

Marciano Ferrier, former otolaryngologist and founder of Odus, explained that before AI it would have been impossible to achieve similar results. Knisper was trained on thousands of videos in multiple languages, including variations such as background noise and audio distortion. This took some time, but Odus is now out of development and focused on hiring, managing director Joost Taverne told TechCrunch in February.

“We are already working with a number of museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” said Tavern, a former congressman and diplomat who was in the United States. “We're also working with a Dutch publisher to produce an audiobook, an audiobook of Anne Frank's diary that is accessible even for people with hearing loss. And now we've created a solution for the workspace. I got it.”

Entering the B2B market is not an easy path, so it makes sense for Audas to focus on clients such as museums. There is a lot of noise, so the audio guide may be difficult to hear. Using Knisper's technology to make speech more intelligible benefits people with hearing loss as well as the general public, making it easier to implement.

Whisps

Setting up the Whispp app

Image credit: Whisp

Fellow Dutch startup Whispp also focuses on speeches, but from a different angle. As TechCrunch reported from CES earlier this year, the technology converts whispers into natural speech in real time.

Whispp's primary target audience is “a currently underserved group of 300 million people around the world with speech disorders who have lost their voices but can still articulate clearly,” the site says. are doing.

For example, people with voice disorders who can only whisper or use their esophageal voice. Or some people, like CEO Joris Castermans, stutter. He is well aware of how little impact there is when speaking in a whisper.

Solutions such as text-to-speech apps already exist for people with impaired intelligibility due to ALS, MS, Parkinson's disease, or stroke, but these have drawbacks such as long latencies. For those who can still articulate, it may be too much of a trade-off.

Thanks to audio-to-audio AI, Whispp can generate real-time, language-independent, and deliver realistic, natural-sounding audio. It can even sound like your own voice if you can provide a sample.

Whispp is also more secure than alternatives because there's no text in between, Castermans told TechCrunch. This could open up use cases for silent patients who need confidential conversations, he said.

It's unclear how much users without voice issues would be willing to pay for Whispp's technology, but there are some monetization routes it should explore with its core users, such as subscriptions to voice calling apps.

acapella

Image credit: Acapella Group

Whispp emphasizes the need to save your audio for later use. This process, known as voice banking, is what Acapella hopes to facilitate with the service it launched last year.

Acquired by Swedish tech accessibility company Tobii Dynavox in 2022 for €9.8 million, Acapela Group has been in the text-to-speech space for decades, but only recently has AI changed the game for voice cloning. It is about.

The results will be much better and the process will also be faster. This lowers the bar for voice banking, and while not everyone will do it yet, there may be demand for people who have been diagnosed with certain illnesses and know they are at risk of losing their voice. .

Acapela does not charge a fee for the initial stage of the service, which consists of a 50-sentence record. Users must purchase audio directly through Acapela or through a third party (such as a partner, reseller, or national health insurance program) only if they need to install audio on their device.

In addition to the new possibilities unlocked by AI, the examples above illustrate some of the routes startups are exploring to expand beyond their core target of users with disabilities.

One idea is that a large addressable market increases future revenues and spreads costs. But for our customers and partners, it's also a way to stay true to the definition of accessibility: “quality of entry or use by all people, including people with disabilities.”



Source link

Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email

Related Posts

7 days left: Founders and VCs save over $300 on all stage passes

March 24, 2025

AI chip startup Furiosaai reportedly rejecting $800 million acquisition offer from Meta

March 24, 2025

20 Hottest Open Source Startups of 2024

March 22, 2025

Andrill may build a weapons factory in the UK

March 21, 2025

Startup Weekly: Wiz bets paid off at M&A Rich Week

March 21, 2025

Wayve CEO shares his key elements for scaling autonomous driving technology

March 21, 2025

Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

Top Reviews
Editors Picks

7 days left: Founders and VCs save over $300 on all stage passes

March 24, 2025

AI chip startup Furiosaai reportedly rejecting $800 million acquisition offer from Meta

March 24, 2025

20 Hottest Open Source Startups of 2024

March 22, 2025

Andrill may build a weapons factory in the UK

March 21, 2025
About Us
About Us

Welcome to Tech Brunch, your go-to destination for cutting-edge insights, news, and analysis in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cryptocurrency, Technology, and Startups. At Tech Brunch, we are passionate about exploring the latest trends, innovations, and developments shaping the future of these dynamic industries.

Our Picks

How to delete 23andMe data

June 14, 2025

New AI-generated tags in the App Store are in beta

June 14, 2025

Investor Experience with TechCrunch All Stages: 1 Floor, Endless Trading Flow

June 14, 2025

Subscribe to Updates

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss our latest news

Subscribe my Newsletter for New Posts & tips Let's stay updated!

© 2025 TechBrunch. Designed by TechBrunch.
  • Home
  • About Tech Brunch
  • Advertise with Tech Brunch
  • Contact us
  • DMCA Notice
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.