Answer extracted from The Angel Next Door podcast — listen to the full episode below.
Why does Adaptation Ventures differentiate itself by including people with disabilities as accredited LPs?
Adaptation Ventures uniquely structures its fund with accredited investors who have disabilities—including people who are blind, deaf or hard of hearing, have spinal cord injuries, paralysis, memory disorders, neurodivergence, or are caretakers—alongside high net worth individuals and family offices. This brings extreme conviction to investment decisions because LPs are making choices from lived experience and diverse perspectives across the disability and aging spectrum.
Lived Experience as Investment Conviction
The traditional venture capital world overwhelmingly lacks disability representation among decision-makers. Only 1% of venture capital currently flows to disability-related solutions, a gap rooted partly in the fact that most investors have never lived with disability. Adaptation Ventures flips this dynamic by intentionally recruiting disabled investors as equal partners in the fund's governance and investment strategy.
As Brittany Palmer explains in the episode, this mixed composition—combining disability community insight with institutional capital—creates a lens that traditional VCs simply cannot match. When a blind LP evaluates a vision-accessibility product, or a deaf investor assesses communication technology, they bring years of lived experience that no amount of market research can replicate.
Diverse Perspectives Across the Disability Spectrum
The fund's LP base intentionally spans the entire disability and aging ecosystem: Paralympic athletes, disability authors, influencers, and people living with a wide range of disabilities. This diversity ensures that no single assumption dominates the investment committee. Each disability brings its own market insight and unmet need, which helps the fund identify portfolio companies solving genuinely critical problems rather than those that merely seem innovative on paper.
This approach also addresses a stark reality: founders with disabilities are 400 times less likely to raise funding than able-bodied counterparts, according to UK research. Adaptation Ventures' LP structure directly counters this bias by ensuring that disabled founders encounter investors who recognize their value immediately, without the skepticism or knowledge gaps that plague traditional pitching environments.
"We designed for the kind of hardest user in mind, and when it hits universal appeal, it just explodes."
Brittany Palmer — Co-Founder, Adaptation Ventures. Born with a bilateral below elbow limb difference, Palmer spent her career solving accessibility barriers. She transitioned from environmental health and safety consulting to founding a disability tech company focused on equal access to travel for people with limited mobility, before co-founding Adaptation Ventures alongside her husband Rich. She also serves as an Advisory Board Member at the Perkins School for the Blind Innovation Center.
The fund targets 20 to 30 companies across its investment period, each evaluated through this unique disability-informed lens. The minimum LP commitment is $36,000 over three years ($12,000 per year), making it accessible to disabled individuals who may not have the wealth of traditional institutional investors but have the expertise and conviction that matters most.
For a deeper dive into the fund's sector strategy and how curb cut principles drive product development across disability tech, listen to the full conversation with the Palmers on this episode.
Key takeaways
- Adaptation Ventures includes accredited investors with disabilities as equal LPs, creating investment decisions grounded in lived experience rather than assumption.
- The LP base spans the entire disability spectrum—blind, deaf, neurodivergent, and mobility-disabled investors, plus Paralympic athletes and disability advocates.
- Only 1% of venture capital currently reaches disability-related solutions; founders with disabilities are 400 times less likely to raise funding than able-bodied peers.
- Disabled LPs bring immediate credibility and expertise to evaluating disability tech, reducing bias and accelerating recognition of genuinely critical market problems.
See also
What types of companies and sectors is Adaptation Ventures investing across in its pre-seed portfolio?
Adaptation Ventures is seeing a 50/50 or slightly hardware-weighted split between software and hardware companies across sectors including education, healthcare, workplace accessibility, and aging technologies.
What percentage of founders with disabilities successfully raise venture funding compared to able-bodied counterparts?
A study done in the UK showed that founders with disabilities are 400 times less likely to raise funding than their able-bodied counterparts, highlighting a massive gap in venture capital access for the disability community.
What is the curb cut effect and how does it apply to disability tech product development?
The curb cut effect means that when developers solve for a particular disabled person's problem, the solution benefits many more people beyond the original intended user, creating universal appeal and broader market impact.