TestParty, an AI-powered software compliance company, today announced a $4 million seed round co-led by Harlem Capital and Urban Innovation Fund.
The company's CEO and CTO, Michael Babel and Jason Tan, co-founded TestParty in March 2023 with the goal of automatically rewriting source code to help companies avoid violating global digital accessibility regulations such as the European Accessibility Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Currently, nearly all of the home pages of the world's most popular websites do not comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This means that most of the world's websites are completely inaccessible to people who are visually impaired or who need other assistive devices to browse the web. TestParty aims to solve this problem by automating testing, remediation, training, and code monitoring to bring websites into compliance with accessibility standards.
Tan first came across the idea while working at Twitch, which was sued in 2021 for lack of digital accessibility. After researching the issue further, Tan realized that such disability lawsuits were common and that the rapid expansion of the Internet meant many people were overlooking the guardrails that would make technology more inclusive. He believed that training engineers with AI would make it easier for them to write code for more accessible websites, so he teamed up with Babel.
This kind of inclusive technology is exactly what advocates are talking about when they say they want more innovation that takes overlooked communities into account. With a compliance management software market worth well over $30 billion, finding ways to automate tedious coding tasks will no doubt help make accessibility easier for businesses.
Image credit: TestParty
Traditionally, companies have hired consultants to manually audit and fix their code bases. But Bervell and Tan predict that this approach will no longer work as more digital products appear on the market. There is also growing regulatory pressure on the issue, with the EU managing digital accessibility complaints from 2025 and the US mandating compliance for local, state and federal agencies. They believe consultants will soon be unable to keep up with the increased demand, which is where TestParty and automation come in.
“Instead of hiring accessibility experts at hundreds of dollars an hour, we can equip existing engineers with the skills they need to write ADA-compliant code,” Babel says. “Accessibility becomes a human right, it becomes more affordable, and ultimately it creates a more accessible internet.”
The round closed in just 71 days, but Berber said the journey was all about persistence. The team was introduced to lead investor Harlem Capital because Berber had interned there. Berber stayed in touch with the team and attended alumni events. The company said this is the first time it has invested in a company founded by someone who previously worked there.
“We believe TestParty will leave an indelible mark on society by becoming the ultimate solution to make all websites accessible to everyone,” Henri-Pierre Jacques, managing partner at Harlem Capital, told TechCrunch.
K Ventures and Soma Capital also participated in the round.
Tan met Babel while he was taking a gap year in the Smoky Mountains around 2021. At the time, Tan was attending Princeton University and then working at Twitch and helping run TigerLaunch, one of the world's largest student-run startup competitions, while Babel was working as a portfolio development manager at Microsoft's venture fund and as a software engineer at X.
“I realized that if I could find a business I care about that has both a social impact and a business mission, I could have a bigger impact as a founder,” Babel said of his decision to become a founder. Meanwhile, Tan had always wanted to be a founder. The two hope to make a difference together. “TestParty is a business with such a big impact on society and a caring community, so working there felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”