Rev is an American speech-to-text company that pairs the world's most accurate AI speech recognition with a global network of human transcriptionists to deliver transcription, captions, and subtitles at up to 99% accuracy. Founded in 2010 by six MIT-connected entrepreneurs, Rev serves over 100,000 customers and more than a million users across legal, media, education, and enterprise, and has increasingly focused its AI on the legal market with tools for depositions, evidence, and case prep.
Nagish is a New York-based assistive-technology company that uses proprietary AI to caption phone calls in real time, converting speech to text and text to speech so people who are deaf or hard of hearing can make and receive calls independently and privately - without a human relay operator. Its name means 'accessible' in Hebrew. The company is one of the few firms certified by the FCC to provide telecommunication relay services and offers its consumer app for free.
Tomer Aharoni is the co-founder and CEO of Nagish, a New York startup using AI to caption phone calls in real time so Deaf and hard-of-hearing people can place and receive calls by typing and reading, with no human operator in the loop. The idea began with a phone ringing during a class at Columbia and a question he couldn't shake: how do you take a call if you can't hear or speak? Nagish (Hebrew for 'accessible') is now FCC-certified, offered free to users through federal subsidies, and has raised $16 million. Aharoni builds the product hand-in-hand with the Deaf community and is now pushing into AI sign-language translation.
Eric Bailey is a Boston-based accessibility advocate, designer, writer, developer, and speaker. As a staff designer on GitHub's Primer design system, he works to make component libraries genuinely usable for people relying on assistive technologies. He is the longtime lead redesigner and maintainer of The A11Y Project, has published more than 200 articles across publications like CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and the GitHub Blog, and is a fixture on the conference circuit. His guiding line: if it's inaccessible, it is neither radical nor revolutionary.
Kilo Loco is the alias of Kyle Lee, a self-taught iOS engineer, instructor, and content creator who turned a string of dead-end jobs into a nine-year career building production mobile apps. After teaching himself Swift to build apps for his own family, he became a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS Amplify, reached tens of thousands of developers through YouTube tutorials and courses, and now leads iOS work on accessibility testing tools at Deque Systems while tinkering at the edge of AI and developer tooling.
Zack Nelson is the American YouTuber behind JerryRigEverything, the most-viewed smartphone repair and teardown channel on YouTube with over 10 million subscribers. Known for his systematic durability tests — scratch, burn, bend — he turned a $1,000 Jeep repair he did himself for $80 into a multi-million-view media empire. Beyond the broken screens and scorched phones, he co-founded Not-a-Wheelchair with his wife Cambry, building affordable off-road and ultra-custom wheelchairs made in the USA, and used his YouTube earnings to fund a full-size community library in Busia County, Kenya.
Jennie Strobeck is AVP of State & Local Sales, Digital Media at Adobe, where she leads government sales strategy across city, county, and state agencies. With a career spanning enterprise tech sales at DLT Solutions, immixGroup, and Avaya Government Solutions, she has spent over two decades at the intersection of technology and public sector transformation. At Adobe, she previously served as Chief of Staff and Channel Sales Manager before stepping into the AVP role in 2022. She is particularly focused on digital accessibility, helping governments meet DOJ WCAG compliance requirements and modernize document workflows at scale.
Evinced is an AI-powered digital accessibility platform that helps engineering teams find, fix, and prevent accessibility defects across web and mobile apps. Founded by ex-Oracle execs in 2018, it sells to enterprise developers and counts six of the ten largest US and UK banks among its customers.
Navin Thadani is the Founder and CEO of Evinced, the leading AI-powered digital accessibility testing company based in Palo Alto, California. A serial entrepreneur with two prior successful exits (Qumranet to Red Hat and Ravello Systems to Oracle), he co-founded Evinced in 2018 with a mission to make the web and mobile apps accessible to the 1.3 billion people worldwide living with disabilities. Under his leadership, Evinced has raised $112 million across three funding rounds, built a 130-person team, and become the only pure technology play in the enterprise accessibility market, serving clients including five of the ten largest media companies in the US and UK, and financial institutions collectively managing $26 trillion in assets.
Satoshi Sugie is the Co-founder and CEO of WHILL, a San Mateo-based personal mobility company that has reimagined the electric wheelchair as a design-forward consumer product. Drawing on his automotive design background at Nissan, Sugie co-founded WHILL in 2012 with a mission to redefine how people perceive and use mobility devices. Under his leadership, WHILL has grown to 350 employees, expanded to 30+ countries, raised over $153 million in funding, and deployed nearly one million autonomous rides at airports worldwide including Tokyo's Haneda, Rome Fiumicino, and Narita. Named to Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2017 and recognized by TIME Magazine's 50 Best Inventions, Sugie's approach treats mobility not as a medical necessity but as an aspirational lifestyle product.
WHILL designs and manufactures intelligent personal electric vehicles - sleek power chairs and an autonomous mobility service - that reframe the wheelchair as a piece of consumer technology. Founded in 2012 by three Japanese engineers from Nissan, Sony and Olympus, the company sells the Model C2 and Model F directly to consumers and operates an autonomous fleet service at airports including Haneda, Narita and Winnipeg.
Wispr Flow is a San Francisco-based AI voice dictation platform that converts natural speech into polished, formatted text across any application at roughly 220 words per minute - about 4x faster than typing. Built by two Stanford AI researchers, the company has quietly become the voice layer that 270 Fortune 500 companies rely on, combining a 10% word error rate (vs. 27% for OpenAI Whisper), 100+ language support, and context-aware formatting that automatically adjusts tone and style based on the active app. With $81M raised and a $700M valuation as of late 2025, Wispr Flow is racing to become the default voice-first operating system for a billion users.
Henry Poole is the co-founder and CEO of CivicActions, a professional services firm that has spent over two decades modernizing government digital services through open source software, agile methodologies, and human-centered design. A serial entrepreneur and open source visionary, Poole co-founded one of the first digital agencies (Vivid Studios) in 1993, published the landmark Affero General Public License (AGPLv1) in 2002 to close the 'ASP loophole' in open source licensing, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation. Under his leadership, CivicActions has become a trusted partner to major federal agencies including CMS, NSF, VA, and HHS, championing the principle that software built with public funds should be publicly owned.
Michael Buckley is the Chairman and CEO of Be My Eyes, the world's largest digital volunteer organization connecting blind and low-vision users with sighted volunteers via live video calls. A communications veteran who spent 12 years at Brunswick Group and three years as Facebook's VP of Global Business Communications, Buckley pivoted to mission-driven tech when he joined Be My Eyes in December 2022. Under his leadership, Be My Eyes launched Be My AI (powered by GPT-4), which TIME named one of the Best Inventions of 2023, and scaled the platform to over 1 million blind and low-vision users supported by 6.7 million volunteers worldwide. He is also co-founder and chairman of Ocean's Halo, a seaweed-based natural foods company, and an active angel investor.
Nayaki Nayyar is a technology executive with over 25 years of experience transforming enterprise software companies. As CEO of Siteimprove since March 2025, she is leading the company's pivot toward AI-powered content intelligence and digital accessibility. Her career spans CTO roles in oil and gas, senior leadership at SAP and BMC Software, President and CPO at Ivanti where she helped double revenue to over a billion dollars, and CEO at cybersecurity unicorn Securonix. She serves on the boards of Fortune 500 companies TD Synnex and Corteva Agriscience.
Suman Kanuganti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Personal AI, a San Francisco-based platform building memory-first AI for enterprise workforce transformation. A two-time venture-backed immigrant founder, he previously built Aira - an AI-powered accessibility company serving the blind and low-vision community that was recognized by TIME Magazine and Fast Company - before turning his attention to giving everyone a permanent, personalized AI trained on their own knowledge. He holds 10 patents in emerging technologies and has raised $16M for Personal AI, with customers including Microsoft, NVIDIA, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile.
Souvik Paul is the CEO and Founder of Aurie, a medtech company that built the first FDA De Novo-cleared reusable intermittent catheter system. A Harvard-educated designer and former J&J strategist, Paul was driven to start Aurie after witnessing a family member's struggle with catheter-associated infections following a spinal cord injury. His Oakland-based startup has raised $14.24M and is pioneering a no-touch, automatically disinfecting catheter system designed to transform care for the 600,000 Americans who rely on intermittent catheters.
Declan Chidlow, known online as Vale, is a Perth-based front-end developer, writer, and photographer who champions the open web from the front of the front-end. Armed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, he builds accessible digital experiences and publishes technical articles across Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, and Piccalilli — while also shipping quirky open-source tools like BritCSS (CSS for those who refuse to spell 'colour' without the u) and Adduce, a Rust-powered static site generator. When not coding or writing, he can be found on a unicycle.
Majid Jabrayilov is an indie iOS developer, SwiftUI educator, and app creator based in Baku, Azerbaijan. Known by his handle 'mecid', he runs the popular Swift with Majid blog and SwiftUI Weekly newsletter, sharing weekly insights on SwiftUI, Swift, and Apple frameworks since 2018. He transitioned from corporate iOS development to full-time indie around 2019-2020, building a suite of health-focused apps including CardioBot and NapBot, and has grown a following of nearly 30,000 on Twitter/X while consistently publishing 230+ newsletter issues.
Natalia Panferova is a Swift developer, author, and co-founder of Nil Coalescing - a technical education company built on the premise that understanding why SwiftUI works the way it does beats memorizing what it does. A former Apple SwiftUI Frameworks Engineer who was recruited after Apple discovered her blog, she personally built APIs (AttributedString, Markdown in Text, sheet detents) now used by millions of iOS developers daily. She publishes books, a blog, and the Nilcoalescing newsletter from a small town in New Zealand's wine country.
Rudrank Riyam is an iOS developer and creator from Gurugram, India, best known for MusadoraKit - a Swift framework that simplifies MusicKit and Apple Music API integration. A WWDC 2019 Scholar, Google Summer of Code 2019 alumni, and former Apple intern, he has built an impressive open-source portfolio spanning music, mesh gradients, vector databases, and AI tooling. His ASC CLI tool was acquired, and he now builds at Rork, an AI-powered no-code mobile app platform. He shares his journey through his AiOS Dispatch newsletter and a comprehensive ebook on MusicKit.
Scott Vinkle is a Toronto-based Accessibility Specialist at Shopify with over 12 years of experience making digital products usable for everyone. Holding the IAAP CPWA certification - one of the highest credentials in web accessibility - he co-leads Shopify's accessibility guild, contributes to W3C ARIA standards, speaks at international conferences, and publishes practical accessibility guidance through his newsletter, blog, and Medium. He's the rare specialist who bridges the gap between compliance checkbox and genuine inclusive design.
Dave Rupert is a senior UX engineer at Microsoft, co-founder of the Austin-based web agency Paravel, and co-host of the long-running ShopTalk Show podcast. With over two decades in web development, he is widely recognized for his accessibility advocacy - notably founding The A11Y Project in 2014 - and for open-source tools like FitVids.js and FitText.js. He brings a maker's instinct, a teacher's heart, and a quietly sharp wit to everything he touches.
Scott Jehl is a Senior Software Engineer on the Web Performance team at Squarespace, a 20-year veteran of the front-end web who helped define modern responsive and performant design. He authored 'Responsible Responsive Design' (A Book Apart, 2014) and co-authored 'Designing with Progressive Enhancement' (2010), created foundational open-source tools like Respond.js, loadCSS, and Picturefill, and recently led the effort that brought lazy loading to HTML video and audio elements - an official web standard as of March 2026. He speaks globally, teaches online, and believes the web should work fast for everyone, everywhere.