Enable Ventures

Startup founders pitch Enable Ventures to secure capital that ties accessibility milestones and disability-inclusive hiring to investment tranches from day one, making resource provisioning part of the deal before the product is built.

ENABLE Model location

• Builder-side Interventions → Set Requirements that Include Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Provision Resources for Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Iterate to Address Shortcomings

What it is

Sorenson Impact Asset Management launched Enable Ventures in June 2022 as a venture capital fund investing at the intersection of disability and innovation, with Gina Kline, a former civil rights attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, as Founder and Managing Partner.¹ The fund describes itself as the first impact venture capital firm dedicated to closing the disability wealth gap through market-rate returns, operating within the Sorenson Impact Platform of Funds backed by entrepreneur Jim Sorenson.

Enable Ventures practices resource provisioning at the capital stage and builder-side requirement-setting in the conditions attached to that capital. It invests in technology that upskills or reskills workers with disabilities, employment-related technology built through co-creation with the disability community, next-generation assistive technology leveraging AI and neurotechnology, and startups founded by people with disabilities.² In January 2025, Enable Ventures led the Series A+ round for Be My Eyes, a Danish AI-driven visual interpreter company, joining its board of directors alongside ECMC Group's Educational Impact Fund and the National Federation of the Blind.³ Liberty Mutual Investments announced a strategic co-investment partnership in May 2025.⁴

Why it matters

Vic Finkelstein, writing in the 1970s as a founding member of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, identified capitalist industrial production as the mechanism that transformed physical impairment into disability. Factory wage labor demanded a standardized working body. Employers and poor-law administrators routed workers who could not maintain Fordist production speeds into segregated institutions, asylums, and "impairment-specific colonies."⁵ Mike Oliver built on this analysis to establish the social model of disability in the early 1980s, naming the economic and built environment, rather than the body, as the primary disabling force.⁶ Venture capital, which emerged as a distinct institutional form in the postwar United States and consolidated during the 1970s and 1980s, reproduced that exclusion through elite network access, pattern-matching on founder archetypes, and pitch processes that assumed mobile, neurotypical, and non-disabled participants. The Americans with Disabilities Act, signed in 1990, reached employment and public accommodation but did not reach private investment decisions. Disability employment rates held nearly flat in the decades after the ADA's passage.⁷ Enable Ventures enters the historical sequence at the point where the capital allocation decision, the resource provisioning stage upstream of product design, hiring, and development, had remained structurally closed to disability inclusion.

Venture capital's gatekeeping operates through institutional norms that disability researchers recognize as structural ableism. The Access2Funding survey, published by the UK Disability Policy Centre in 2023, found that 96 percent of disabled entrepreneurs reported a lack of visibility for disability-led businesses, 84 percent said they lacked equal access to opportunities and resources, and disabled founders were up to 400 percent less likely to secure investment than non-disabled counterparts.⁸ Structural ableism produces these outcomes through pitch formats that assume in-person legibility, due diligence timelines that penalize health-variable schedules, and network-referral pipelines that begin in universities and accelerators that excluded disabled students for decades. When an entire population of founders cannot reach the table, the products those founders would have built do not get built, and the navigator-side compensations that disabled users carry remain unaddressed by the market. The Kauffman Foundation found that employment rates for disabled people stood at roughly 19 percent, compared to 63 percent for non-disabled adults, a gap that employment-protection law alone has not closed.⁹

SSI asset limits, which Congress set at $2,000 for an individual and have not been updated since 1989, function as a structural anti-wealth mechanism. The National Council on Disability's 2023 progress report documented how these limits prevent disabled people from building savings without losing eligibility for the healthcare and cash benefits that offset the costs disability imposes.¹⁰ The American Institutes for Research found that workers with disabilities earn 37 percent less on average than non-disabled workers.¹¹ Households with a disabled adult need an average 28 percent more income to reach an equivalent standard of living, a gap disability advocates call the "crip tax," covering adaptive equipment, accessible housing, personal care labor, and specialty medical costs that non-disabled households do not carry. The World Bank estimated that limited economic participation by disabled people costs the global economy between $1.37 and $1.94 trillion annually.⁷ This fiscal loss does not produce a market correction on its own, because the investors who could fund solutions have built their portfolios around different archetypes. Enable Ventures changes one element of this structure by placing capital where resource provisioning and requirement-setting for disability inclusion occur at the term sheet rather than as an afterthought post-product-market fit. It does not change the size of the overall VC market or its default incentive structure.

Ed Roberts and Judith Heumann built the Berkeley Center for Independent Living in 1972 as the first consumer-controlled disability service organization, making disabled people the governance authority over the resources they depended on rather than the market target.¹² Marta Russell's Beyond Ramps (1998) and her collected essays in Capitalism and Disability (edited by Keith Rosenthal) extend that history into critique. Her "money model" argues that disabled people function as a resource through which capital extracts surplus value, with entire sectors of the economy organized around managing disabled bodies.¹³ Russell described the ADA as "free market civil rights," a law made palatable to Congress by framing disability inclusion as an economic efficiency argument rather than a rights claim. Enable Ventures inherits that framing. Gina Kline's "impact and market-rate return are not a trade-off" accepts capital allocation as the mechanism for disability inclusion without contesting who controls the capital or what gets funded when returns and access diverge. Alison Kafer's Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013) names a further pressure. Technology-driven visions of disability futures, including AI accessibility tools funded by impact investors, can reinforce what Kafer calls the "curative imaginary," the organizing premise that disability is a problem to be eliminated through innovation rather than a political identity to be organized around.¹⁴ Russell and Kafer do not argue against capital flowing to disabled founders or to assistive technology. Both contest the premise that market-rate returns and disability self-determination share the same horizon, and both ask who defines what a good disability future looks like when that definition depends on what investors are willing to fund.

Financial exclusion produces measurable biological risk. Researchers at The Lancet Regional Health Americas documented structural ableism as a direct driver of health disparities, identifying income gaps, inadequate health insurance, and inaccessible housing as predictors of worse self-rated health and greater functional limitation among people with disabilities.¹⁵ Poverty produces chronic stress through mechanisms researchers have traced to cortisol dysregulation. Subacute financial threat elevates cortisol for longer durations than acute stressors, disrupting sleep, immune function, and inflammatory regulation over time.¹⁶ Disabled people carry intersecting risk because the crip tax concentrates financial precarity, and that precarity embeds as chronic physiological load. Black and Latino workers with disabilities face compounded exposure, earning roughly 67 to 68 cents for every dollar earned by non-disabled white workers, and in 2020, one in four disabled Black adults lived in poverty compared to one in seven of their white counterparts.¹⁷ The same arrangement that excludes disability-led founders from capital produces these health outcomes. Capital exclusion limits which technologies reach the market, which adaptations become affordable, and which bodies continue to carry the cost of inaccessibility as a chronic physical burden.

Enable Ventures advances a position no prior fund had occupied, deploying market-rate venture capital as a mechanism for requiring disability inclusion at the investment decision itself. The Be My Eyes investment, in which the National Federation of the Blind joined the cap table alongside Enable Ventures, illustrates what that position makes possible. Disability community governance now sits embedded directly in a company's ownership structure.³ The scale of the overall VC market, the voluntary nature of impact investing, and the SSI and Medicaid asset limits that prevent many of the founders Enable Ventures targets from accumulating the personal wealth that non-disabled founders use to bootstrap before raising institutional capital all constrain the frontier beyond the fund's own design choices. A single fund operating at seed-to-Series A cannot restructure federal benefit law, change VC norms at scale, or eliminate the crip tax. It can demonstrate that disability inclusion and financial returns coexist, and capital markets, not individual funds, will determine whether the rest of the market acts on that demonstration.

Real-world examples

In the news

Sorenson Impact Group Announces Launch of Enable Ventures (June 2022)
-- GlobeNewswire

• Enable Ventures launched as an impact venture fund within the Sorenson Impact Platform, focused on the disability wealth gap and disability-led innovation. The fund's four investment categories position disability inclusion as a builder-side requirement baked into investment decisions rather than a post-launch compliance checkbox.

In the news

Be My Eyes Raises $6.1 Million to Accelerate AI-Powered Accessibility (January 2025)
-- Be My Eyes

• Enable Ventures led the Series A+ round for Be My Eyes, an AI-driven visual interpreter serving blind and low-vision users. The round included the National Federation of the Blind as an investor, placing a disability organization inside the company's governance structure. Gina Kline joined the board, embedding requirement-setting oversight at the board level.

In the news

Enable Ventures Announces Mindset Care Raises $13M in Total Funding (2024)
-- Enable Ventures Press Release

• Enable Ventures backed Mindset Care, an AI startup that modernizes the Social Security Disability application process. The investment targets one of the most structurally hostile administrative experiences disabled people endure, a claims process built for denial rather than access.

• The Access2Funding report found that 96 percent of disabled entrepreneurs reported a lack of visibility for disability-led businesses, and 84 percent lacked equal access to the funding opportunities available to non-disabled founders.⁸
• The World Bank estimated that limited economic participation by disabled people costs the global economy $1.37 to $1.94 trillion annually, quantifying the market failure that a fund like Enable Ventures targets.⁷
• The Kauffman Foundation reported that prior to 2Gether-International's launch in 2015, no fund had focused exclusively on founders with disabilities, and data on funding for disabled entrepreneurs remained "virtually nonexistent."⁹

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the resource-provisioning, requirement-setting, and iteration stages involves investors naming disability inclusion as a precondition for capital, not a feature request:

• "We designed the hiring plan with disabled workers at the table before we finalized our product spec."
• "Our next tranche is contingent on the accessibility audit we committed to in the term sheet."
• "We don't have a separate accessibility track. It runs through every sprint because it has to."
• "We brought in disabled co-founders at the ideation stage so the product reflects actual use, not assumed use."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect involves deferring disability inclusion until scale makes it economically invisible to ignore:

• "We'll add accessibility once we've found product-market fit."
• "Our investors haven't asked about it yet."
• "We serve a general population, so disability isn't really our use case."
• "Compliance is a legal question, not a product question."
• "We don't have the bandwidth to build for edge cases right now."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor disabled founders and users carry when upstream investment gatekeepers exclude disability from their criteria:

• "I had to pitch twenty VCs before anyone took the market size seriously. They all thought disabled users were a niche."
• "I built around an inaccessible API because the accessible alternative had no funding and was two years behind."
• "Every time I raise a round, I'm educating the investor about the disability economy before I can talk about my product."
• "I intentionally kept my income under the threshold so I wouldn't lose my Medicaid. That meant I couldn't grow the company the way I needed to."

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All observations occur within the context of disability-focused venture capital and impact investment in the United States, with particular reference to early-stage technology startups serving disabled populations.

Footnotes

1. GlobeNewswire, "Sorenson Impact Group Announces Launch of Enable Ventures," June 16, 2022. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/06/16/2464311/0/en/Sorenson-Impact-Group-Announces-Launch-of-Enable-Ventures-an-Impact-Investing-Strategy-at-the-Intersection-of-Innovation-and-Disability.html ↩

2. AARP AgeTech Collaborative, "Enable Ventures: Closing the Disability Wealth Gap Through Inclusive Innovation," October 2, 2025. https://home.agetechcollaborative.org/startup/blogs/agetech-collaborative-from-aarp/2025/10/02/enable-ventures-closing-the-disability-wealth-gap ↩

3. Be My Eyes, "Be My Eyes Raises $6.1 Million to Accelerate Adoption of its AI-powered Accessibility Products," January 2025. https://www.bemyeyes.com/news/be-my-eyes-raises-6-1-million-to-accelerate-adoption-of-its-ai-powered-accessibility-products/ ↩ ↩²

4. Enable Ventures Press Release, "Liberty Mutual Investments and Enable Ventures Announce Strategic Partnership," May 2025. https://www.enableventures.vc/press-release-1/liberty-mutual-investments-and-enable-ventures-announce-strategic-partnership ↩

5. Mike Oliver, "Capitalism, Disability and Ideology," 1999. https://www.independentliving.org/docs3/oliver99.pdf (drawing on Vic Finkelstein's analysis of industrial capitalism and disability, originating in Finkelstein's "Attitudes and Disabled People," 1980). ↩

6. Mike Oliver, The Politics of Disablement, 1990. The social model's core distinction between impairment and the disabling environment was introduced in Oliver's 1983 work building on UPIAS's "Fundamental Principles of Disability," 1976. ↩

7. Kauffman Foundation, "Entrepreneurship is a pathway for founders with disabilities to address wealth and employment gaps," 2022. https://www.kauffman.org/currents/2gether-international-entrepreneurs-with-disabilities/ (citing World Bank estimate of $1.37–$1.94 trillion in annual GDP loss). ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. The Disability Policy Centre, Access2Funding Report, 2023. https://thedisabilitypolicycentre.org/access2funding ↩ ↩²

9. Kauffman Foundation, "Entrepreneurship is a pathway for founders with disabilities," 2022. https://www.kauffman.org/currents/2gether-international-entrepreneurs-with-disabilities/ ↩ ↩²

10. National Council on Disability, "2023 Progress Report: Toward Economic Security: The Impact of Income and Asset Limits on People with Disabilities," October 2023. https://www.ncd.gov/report/2023-progress-report-toward-economic-security-the-impact-of-income-and-asset-limits-on-people-with-disabilities/ ↩

11. American Institutes for Research, "Those with Disabilities Earn 37% Less on Average; Gap is Even Wider in Some States." https://www.air.org/news/press-release/those-disabilities-earn-37-less-average-gap-even-wider-some-states ↩

12. Berkeley Center for Independent Living history: "The History of the Berkeley Center for Independent Living," Independent Living Institute. https://www.independentliving.org/docs3/zukas.html; also "Berkeley's Center for Independent Living, which launched the disability rights movement, turns 50," Berkeleyside, October 2022. https://www.berkeleyside.org/2022/10/24/center-for-independent-living-berkeley ↩

13. Marta Russell, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract, Common Courage Press, 1998; and Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell, edited by Keith Rosenthal, Haymarket Books, 2019. For the "money model" and ADA as "free market civil rights": Marta Russell and Ravi Malhotra, "Capitalism and Disability," Socialist Register, 2002. https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/download/5784/2680/7711 ↩

14. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, Indiana University Press, 2013. On the curative imaginary: https://iupress.org/9780253009340/feminist-queer-crip/ ↩

15. Robyn Lewis Brown, "Structural Ableism, Health, and Functioning among People with Disabilities: An Extension of the Social Determinants of Health Framework," Sociological Inquiry, 2025. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00221465251379456; also: "Structural ableism in public health and healthcare: a definition and conceptual framework," Lancet Regional Health, Americas, 2024. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10770745/ ↩

16. Research on poverty and chronic cortisol elevation: "Understanding the impact of exposure to adverse socioeconomic conditions on chronic stress from a complexity science perspective," BMC Medicine, 2021. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12916-021-02106-1 ↩

17. National Disability Institute, "Financial Inequality: Disability, Race and Poverty in America," Nanette Goodman. https://www.nationaldisabilityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/disability-race-poverty-in-america.pdf ↩