Answer extracted from the The Angel Next Door podcast — listen to the full episode below.
How far behind are disability founders in raising venture funding?
Founders with disabilities are 400 times less likely to raise venture funding than able-bodied counterparts, according to research conducted in the UK. This staggering disparity reveals a fundamental broken link in the early-stage investment ecosystem—one that dedicated capital and specialized infrastructure must now urgently address.
The venture capital industry has systematically overlooked disability entrepreneurs. As discussed in The Angel Next Door, this 400-to-1 gap does not reflect a shortage of talent or viable business models—it reflects structural indifference. The problem runs deeper than unconscious bias; it is systemic architectural failure in how venture capital discovers, evaluates, and funds early-stage companies.
Why disability founders remain invisible to traditional capital
The most immediate barrier is that only 1% of all venture capital flows to disability-related solutions, and even that sliver concentrates in later-stage companies with proven traction. No credible early-stage ecosystem exists. Without visible disability-focused angel investors, scout networks, or pre-seed funds, disability founders have no clear pathway into the first capital conversations—the very conversations that generate founder-investor relationships and momentum.
Brittany Palmer, co-founder of Adaptation Ventures, embodies this gap firsthand. Born with a bilateral below elbow limb difference, she spent her career solving accessibility problems—first in environmental health and safety consulting, then founding a disability tech company focused on equal access to travel for people with limited mobility. Yet the traditional venture landscape never invited her into the room. This experience shaped the founding thesis of Adaptation Ventures, a pre-seed fund and investor community explicitly designed to reverse this invisibility.
Brittany Palmer — Co-Founder, Adaptation Ventures; Advisory Board Member, Perkins School for the Blind Innovation Center. Born with a bilateral below elbow limb difference, Palmer built her career solving disability and accessibility challenges across consulting and tech entrepreneurship, growing her first disability tech company before co-founding Adaptation Ventures to redirect early-stage capital toward overlooked disability, neurodivergence, accessibility, and aging founders.
The 400-to-1 gap is not an outlier—it is the predictable output of a system that conflates disability with dependence rather than difference. Adaptation Ventures was built to prove that this disparity is solvable, combining pre-seed capital, investor community, and dedicated infrastructure to create the earliest-stage pathway disability founders have never had access to.
See also
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 user—a principle that defines universal design.
Why is early-stage capital in disability technology so critically underserved by venture capital?
Only 1% of venture capital currently goes to disability-related solutions, and most of that is at later stages. There is no credible early-stage ecosystem supporting disability founders from day one.
What is Adaptation Ventures and how does it combine fund structures with investor community?
Adaptation Ventures is a pioneering combination of a pre-seed fund and investor community focused on disability, neurodivergence, accessibility, and aging—bridging the gap between early-stage disability founders and dedicated capital.