Startups

Stark wants to make it easier to design accessible websites and software

Comment

Two designers are designing colors of mobile app layouts.
Image Credits: Wasan Tita / Getty Images

Stark is a startup that wants to help designers make software and websites more accessible for people with disabilities, and they’ve created a set of tools that plug into popular design tools and browsers to help.

Cat Noone, co-founder and CEO at Stark, says she and her co-founder and CTO Michael Fouquet launched the company out of a desire to simplify accessible design. “Stark has a very big mission to make the world’s software accessible for everyone. And we help companies supercharge accessibility from months to minutes with a very simple end-to-end workflow,” Noone told TechCrunch.

Today, the company announced a $6 million seed investment along with the release of a suite of tools to make it easier for individuals and teams to build accessible designs.

She says they do this through automated intelligent analysis and by providing seamless fixes for both design and code as part of the process. The Stark Suite of tools is trying to make it easy for designers to build accessibility into their designs by plugging directly into popular design tools including Figma, Sketch and Adobe XD, and popular browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera and Brave.

Designers can check for elements like font size, color choices, contrast and alt text, among other things, and look for the most accessible choices, making accessibility part of the design process. Noone says that at least 1.5 billion people in the world report having at least one disability. She sees making software and websites accessible not only a fairness issue, but also one that increasingly involves compliance, with a growing body of accessibility regulations, not unlike security or privacy.

“Accessibility is not a small problem. It’s part of what we call a company’s internal PSA — privacy, security, accessibility — and accessibility [stands] right alongside privacy and security as one of these three major issues in software development that’s been ignored,” she said.

Benedikt Lehnert, Stark’s chief design officer, who previously held design roles at SAP and Microsoft, says the company is trying to make accessible design available to designers wherever they are working, which he sees as a major difference between his company’s offering and other similar products, which tend to cover only website accessibility.

“Stark empowers software teams to design, build and test accessible products of all sorts, whether those are marketing websites, SaaS products, mobile apps or any other software,” he said.

He added, “It’s a suite of tools, and when you buy into the Stark ecosystem the whole philosophy is that we hook into the tools that your product team is already using, whether you’re the designer, developer, project manager or QA expert, and stitch them together into an accessibility workflow,” he said.

Today, the company has four pricing tiers, starting with a free offering along with paid tiers for pros, teams and enterprises.

The founders originally conceived of the idea in 2017, and formed the company officially in 2020. They raised a pre-seed round that same year, and closed the $6 million seed round earlier this year.

The startup currently has 18 employees in a distributed team, and plans to be conservative when it comes to hiring, letting the market guide them. Noone says from a diversity perspective, a company that is aiming to make software and websites more accessible has to be open to hiring people with disabilities.

“Here at Stark a majority of the team is disabled. I’m a female founder, but I’m also a disabled CEO, and a majority of the people on the team have some form of at least one disability, and we’re all very open about it. It’s something that we don’t shy away from. We lean into it,” she said. And it helps them build a better product.

The $6 million seed investment was led by Uncork Capital with help from Darling Ventures, Indicator Ventures and a variety of industry angels.

The real ROI of making your products more accessible

More TechCrunch

When Jordan Nathan launched his DTC nontoxic cookware company, Caraway, in 2019, he knew he was not the only founder trying to sell a new brand of pots and pans…

Why being the last company to launch in a category can pay off

Out of an abundance of caution, the car took two minutes to turn a corner.

This humanoid robot can drive cars — sort of

There has been a silly amount of drama in the run-up to Tesla‘s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday. The company is set to hold a vote on “re-ratifying” the $56…

Ahead of Tesla’s big shareholder vote, let’s re-read the judge’s opinion that got us here

To give users more control over the contacts an app can and cannot access, the permissions screen has two stages.

iOS 18 cracks down on apps asking for full address book access

The push to produce a robotic intelligence that can fully leverage the wide breadth of movements opened up by bipedal humanoid design has been a key topic for researchers.

Generative AI takes robots a step closer to general purpose

A TechCrunch review of LinkedIn data found that Ford has built this team up to around 300 employees over the last year.

Ford’s secretive, low-cost EV team is growing with talent from Rivian, Tesla and Apple

The most critical systems of our modern world rely on GPS, from aviation and road networks to emergency and disaster response, from precision farming and power grids to weather forecasting…

Tern AI wants to reduce reliance on GPS with low-cost navigation alternative 

Since fintech startup Brex’s inception in 2017, its two co-founders Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi have run the company as co-CEOs. But starting today, the pair told TechCrunch in an…

Fintech Brex abandons co-CEO model, talks IPO, cash burn and plans for a secondary sale

Hiya, folks, and welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, Apple stole the spotlight. At the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in Cupertino, Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence,…

This Week in AI: Apple won’t say how the sausage gets made

India’s largest wealth manager focused on ultra-high-net-worth individuals, 360 One WAM, has agreed to acquire popular Indian mutual fund investment app ET Money for about $44 million. Earlier called IIFL…

India’s 360 One acquires mutual fund app ET Money for $44M

Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member and the director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, is worried Congress might react in a “knee-jerk” way where…

Helen Toner worries ‘not super functional’ Congress will flub AI policy

Layoffs are tough. This year alone, we’ve already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies according to layoffs.fyi. Looking for ways to grow your network can be even harder during…

Layoffs Got You Down? Get a Half-Price Expo+ Pass at Disrupt 2024

YouTube announced this week the rollout of “Thumbnail Test & Compare,” a new tool for creators to see which thumbnail performs the best. The feature first launched to select creators…

YouTube creators can now test multiple video thumbnails

Waymo has voluntarily issued a software recall to all 672 of its Jaguar I-Pace robotaxis after one of them collided with a telephone pole. This is Waymo’s second recall. The…

Waymo issues second recall after robotaxi hit telephone pole

The hotel guest management technology company’s platform digitizes the hotel guest journey from post-booking through checkout.

Insight Partners backs Canary Technologies’ mission to elevate hotel guest experiences

The TechCrunch team runs down all of the biggest news from the Apple WWDC 2024 keynote in an easy-to-skim digest.

Here’s everything Apple announced at the WWDC 2024 keynote, including Apple Intelligence, Siri makeover

InScope leverages machine learning and large language models to provide financial reporting and auditing processes for mid-market and enterprises.

Lightspeed Venture Partners leads $4.3M seed in automated financial reporting fintech InScope

Venture fundraising has been a slog over the last few years, even for firms with a strong track record. That’s Foresite Capital’s experience. Despite having 47 IPOs, 28 M&As and…

Foresite Capital raises $900M sixth fund for investing in life sciences companies

A year ago, Databricks acquired MosaicML for $1.3 billion. Now rebranded as Mosaic AI, the platform has become integral to Databricks’ AI solutions. Today, at the company’s Data + AI…

Databricks expands Mosaic AI to help enterprises build with LLMs

RetailReady targets the $40 billion compliance market to help reduce the number of retail compliance losses that shippers incur annually due to incorrectly shipped packages.

YC grad RetailReady raises $3.3M for an AI warehouse app that hopes to save brands billions

Since its launch in 2013, Databricks has relied on its ecosystem of partners, such as Fivetran, Rudderstack, and dbt, to provide tools for data preparation and loading. But now, at…

Databricks launches LakeFlow to help its customers build their data pipelines

A big shoutout to the early-stage founders who missed the application window for the Startup Battlefield 200 (SB 200) at TechCrunch Disrupt. We have exciting news just for you! You…

Bonus: An extra week to apply to Startup Battlefield 200

When one of the co-creators of the popular open source stream-processing framework Apache Flink launches a new startup, it’s worth paying attention. Stephan Ewen was among the founding team of…

Restate raises $7M for its lightweight workflows-as-code platform

With most residential solar panels installed by smaller companies, customer experience can be a mixed bag. To try to address the quality and consistency problem, Civic Renewables is buying small…

Civic Renewables is rolling up residential solar installers to improve quality and grow the market

Small VC firms require deep trust, mutual support and long-term commitment among the partners — a kinship that, in many ways, resembles a family dynamic. Colin Anderson (Palantir’s ex-CFO and…

Friends & Family Capital, a fund founded by ex-Palantir CFO and son of IVP’s founder, unveils third $118M fund

Fisker is issuing the first recall for its all-electric Ocean SUV because of problems with the warning lights, according to new information published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration…

Fisker’s troubled Ocean SUV gets its first recall

Gorilla, a Belgian company that serves the energy sector with real-time data and analytics for pricing and forecasting, has raised €23 million ($25 million) in a Series B round led…

Gorilla, a Belgian startup that helps energy providers crunch big data, raises $25M

South Korea’s fabless AI chip industry saw a slew of fundraising events over the last couple of years as demand for hardware to power AI applications skyrocketed, and it seems…

Fabless AI chip makers Rebellions and Sapeon to merge as competition heats up in global AI hardware industry

Here’s a list of third-party apps that were Sherlocked by Apple at this year’s WWDC.

The apps that Apple sherlocked at WWDC 2024

Black Semiconductor, which is developing a chip-connecting technology based on graphene, has raised $273M in a combination of private and public funding. 

Black Semiconductor nabs $273M in Germany to supercharge how chips work together