Disability-Led Ventures: Founders Turning Lived Experience into Innovation
Some of the most useful products and services in disability inclusion were started by people who live with the barriers they set out to remove. This article profiles five ventures founded or co-founded by disabled people, where the founder's own experience is part of the public record, and looks at what their stories suggest about designing from lived experience.
We have only included founders whose disability is documented in their own words or in an authoritative profile, and only facts we could confirm in current sources.
Be My Eyes
Launched: 2015, Denmark
Founder: Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a visually impaired Danish craftsman
What it does: Be My Eyes is a free app that connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers through live video, so they can get help with everyday visual tasks such as reading a label or checking a setting.
How lived experience shaped it: According to Be My Eyes, the idea grew out of Wiberg's work with the Danish Association of the Blind, where he saw how often people needed a moment of visual assistance for everyday tasks. Seeing a friend get that kind of help over a video call with family led him to ask what would happen if blind and low-vision people could reach a global network of volunteers instead.
Impact and growth: When the app launched in 2015, 10,000 volunteers signed up within 24 hours. Be My Eyes now reports more than 11 million volunteers and more than 1 million blind and low-vision users, across 150+ countries and 180+ languages. In February 2018 it launched what is now its Service Directory (previously Specialized Help), with Microsoft as the first company, and in March 2023 it launched Be My AI, which adds AI-generated image descriptions.
The lesson: Wiberg did not try to replace human help with a device. He used simple technology to make help that already existed easy to reach.
Purple and Purple Tuesday
Founder: Mike Adams OBE, who is disabled himself
What it does: Purple works to bring disabled people and businesses together, aiming to change the conversation about disability from disadvantage to potential and value. It builds on its legacy organisation, ecdp, a user-led disability organisation in Essex. Adams also started Purple Tuesday in 2018, an annual initiative that encourages organisations to improve the experience of disabled customers.
How lived experience shaped it: In an interview, Adams described a job interview for a retail graduate scheme in the early 1990s in which the panel chair stopped the interview after 90 seconds and told him he would not be appointed. He has said that experience is why he wants the next generation not to go through what he went through, and why Purple frames disabled people as people who contribute and add value at work and in society.
Impact and growth: Purple Tuesday has spread beyond the UK, with activity in the USA, UAE, South East Asia and Pakistan. Purple also champions the "Purple Pound": citing research by the University of Bristol, it puts the combined spending power of disabled households in the UK at £446 billion per year, with more than 16.8 million disabled people in the UK.
The lesson: A founder who has faced exclusion as a candidate and as a customer can make the business case for inclusion with unusual credibility, because he is speaking about his own market.
Evenbreak
Founded: 2011, United Kingdom
Founder: Jane Hatton, a disabled social entrepreneur, author and TEDx speaker
What it does: Evenbreak is a social enterprise that aims to close the disability employment gap. It runs a global disability job board that describes itself as run by and for disabled people, connecting disabled candidates with inclusive employers.
How lived experience shaped it: Hatton worked in diversity and inclusion before becoming disabled as an adult with a degenerative spinal condition. That experience made the barriers disabled jobseekers face personal, and she set Evenbreak up as a social enterprise rather than a charity. The "by and for disabled people" principle shows in the team itself: the people listed on Evenbreak's team page include members who are blind, use a wheelchair, are dyslexic or live with ME.
Recognition: Hatton has appeared on the Shaw Trust Power 100 list of Britain's most influential disabled people three times, placing 7th in 2019.
The lesson: Hiring platforms built by people who have been on the receiving end of inaccessible recruitment start from the candidate's side of the table.
Sozialhelden and Wheelmap.org
Founded: 2004, Berlin, Germany
Founders: Raúl Aguayo-Krauthausen and his cousin Jan Mörsch
What it does: Sozialhelden is a Berlin-based nonprofit that develops projects on accessibility and inclusion. Its best-known project, Wheelmap.org, launched on 9 July 2010, is a crowdsourced online map for finding and marking wheelchair-accessible places. Places are rated with a traffic-light system: green for fully accessible, yellow for partly accessible and red for not accessible. The map is available in 22 languages, and anyone can contribute without registering.
How lived experience shaped it: Krauthausen has osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease) and uses a wheelchair. On his own website he writes that, as a wheelchair user, he knows how important a barrier-free and inclusive society is. Wheelmap turns that everyday knowledge, whether a café has a step at the door, into shared information that other wheelchair users can rely on. Sozialhelden's other projects include Leidmedien.de, a guide for journalists on reporting about disability without clichés.
The lesson: Disabled people already hold a great deal of local accessibility knowledge. A simple, open tool can turn that knowledge into a public resource.
Tiimo
Founded: 2015, Denmark
Founders: Melissa Würtz Azari and Helene Lassen Nørlem
What it does: Tiimo is a visual planning app designed for neurodivergent people, including people with ADHD, autism and dyslexia.
How lived experience shaped it: Tiimo says Melissa Würtz Azari, who was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia later in life, knew firsthand that traditional planners were not built for the way she processed information, while Helene Lassen Nørlem brought a background in inclusive design. The app grew out of a research project with teenagers with ADHD, and the company describes it as designed by and for neurodivergent brains.
Impact and growth: Tiimo reports that it is used by hundreds of thousands of people in 168 countries. It was an Apple Design Awards finalist in the inclusivity category in 2024, and Apple named it iPhone App of the Year in its 2025 App Store Awards.
The lesson: A product built around how its founder's own brain works can end up serving a much wider audience than "assistive technology" usually reaches.
The Lived-Experience Advantage
These five ventures have something in common: their founders met a barrier personally and built something that people outside that experience had not.
Why Lived Experience Matters in Product Design
- Problem identification. Founders who live with a barrier do not have to imagine it. Wiberg's, Adams's and Hatton's ventures all began with a gap they or the people around them faced.
- Nuance. Knowing that wheelchair users need step-free access is different from knowing which details actually decide whether a place works. That nuance shapes the product.
- Credibility. Disabled customers and jobseekers can tell whether an organisation understands their experience. Ventures "run by and for disabled people", as Evenbreak puts it, build trust from the start.
- Wider reach. Products designed around disability often help many more people. Tiimo, built for neurodivergent users, became Apple's iPhone App of the Year.
Barriers Disabled Founders Face
Disabled entrepreneurs also face practical obstacles:
- Access to support and capital. Accelerators, pitch events and investor networks do not always reach or include disabled founders.
- Inaccessible infrastructure. Coworking spaces, networking events and online tools can be physically or digitally inaccessible.
- Underestimation. Like Adams in his 1990s job interview, disabled founders can be judged on assumptions rather than on what they bring.
What Needs to Change
- Accelerators and incubators can actively recruit disabled founders and make their programmes fully accessible.
- Businesses and funders can recognise the scale of the market: the WHO estimates that 1.3 billion people, or 16% of the world's population, experience significant disability.
- Policy-makers can make sure disabled entrepreneurs are included in small-business support programmes and grants.
Key Takeaways
- Ventures led by disabled founders often start from problems those founders know from the inside.
- Several of them now compete in the mainstream: Be My Eyes and Tiimo serve users worldwide.
- Lived experience is a real advantage in product design, customer insight and credibility.
- The ecosystem still needs to do more to support disabled entrepreneurs, from accessible accelerators to inclusive funding.
- When disabled people lead innovation, the results often benefit everyone.