Disruption Ventures gives up board seat to Five Elms after exiting its Fable position.
Toronto-based accessibility tech startup Fable has raised $25 million USD ($33.8 million CAD) in Series B funding as it looks to further address inclusivity in digital products, including artificial intelligence (AI).
“We bring the voices of those impacted into the conversation and into the decision-making process.”
Kate Kalcevich
Fable
The sole participant of the round was Five Elms Capital, which also led Fable’s Series A round in May 2022. Fable CEO Alwar Pillai told BetaKit in an email statement that the Series B round featured a secondary capital component. While Pillai didn’t disclose the breakdown, only indicating that it was an “up round,” Disruption Ventures general partner Elaine Kunda confirmed to BetaKit that her firm had exited its stake and resigned its board seat. That seat will now be filled by Five Elms Capital senior associate Brandan Fitzgerald.
The new capital will help add individuals with hearing and cognitive disabilities to Fable’s community of product testers, which previously only included those using assistive technologies to help with vision or mobility limitations. Fable said it’s leading a new Cognitive Accessibility Working Group that will identify best practices for including people with cognitive disabilities in accessibility testing.
Fable is also looking to use its platform to tackle accessibility issues in AI training datasets, which it claims often excludes data representing people with disabilities leading to undetected accessibility issues and bias. For example, Pillai noted that AI-based systems meant to detect students cheating or recognize faces may not be properly calibrated for disabled people, and that generative AI tools often struggle to accurately represent people with disabilities, resulting in homogenous and stereotyped content.
Through its platform, Fable said it can use its product testers to provide accessibility feedback, develop best practices, create inclusive datasets, and offer specialized accessible AI training for research and development teams.
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“Fable has a critical role to play in the AI ecosystem, from standards development to generating inclusive datasets for large language models,” Fable head of accessibility innovation Kate Kalcevich said in a statement. “We bring the voices of those impacted into the conversation and into the decision-making process.”
Founded in 2018, Fable helps businesses test the accessibility of their products through its flagship product, Engage, which provides tester recruitment, technical support, and compensation.
Fable also provides online courses to educate product development teams and companies to build inclusive products from the beginning, as well as a free survey tool to assess the usability of a digital product for assistive technology users called the Accessible Usability Scale. Some of its customers include Microsoft, Meta, NBC Universal, and Walmart.
“[Fable] have become the go-to solution for enterprise organizations and have widened their presence in this segment,” Five Elms Capital principal Austin Gideon said in a statement. “We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with the Fable team as they make inclusive design the norm and standard for every product team.”
Fable last secured $13.4 million CAD ($10.5 million USD) as part of its Series A round in May 2022, which led to the launch of its Fable Upskill online course offering. In August 2023, co-founder and CEO Alwar Pillai announced that Fable had laid off 13 employees, but did elaborate on why the cuts were made.
Feature image courtesy Alwar Pillai via LinkedIn.
