Cormac Chisholm and Patrick Guiney. Image: © Enterprise Ireland
The winner of this year’s Slush 100 is slated to be announced later today and will receive a a €1m investment.
DevA11y is less than a year old, but the start-up working towards digital accessibility has garnered widespread recognition by making it to the top three at this year’s Slush 100 competition.
Slush, the Helsinki-based annual start-up and tech event, hosts a competition each year where the winning start-up receives a €1m investment into their business.
Vying for the prize this year along with Ireland’s DevA11y are Canadian start-up Mohana, a platform aiming to help women better understand their perimenopausal symptoms, and Oasys Now, a Dutch start-up working towards making personalised healthcare and precision medicine more accessible.
A former Start-up of the Week, DevA11y co-founder Patrick Guiney said that more than 90pc of the top 1m websites on the internet have accessibility issues – even though 16pc of people identify as having some form of disability.
“We’re living in an age where digital products are unusable by an enormous demographic,” Guiney said.
“We can boil this down to two issues: businesses aren’t prioritising inclusive design and that building accessible products is incredibly difficult.”
The start-up aims to make building accessible products easy for businesses – opening the digital world to more people, regardless of their disabilities.
DevA11y was part of the latest NDRC cohort for its accelerator programme which kicked off earlier this year. It is also one of three start-ups selected for a new Fidelity fellowship programme based at Dogpatch Labs.
Founded in 2023 by Dóra Jámbor – a scientist from the Montreal-based artificial intelligence research institute Mila – Mohana is a precision platform to help women reduce the time and effort required to detect, understand, and act on hormonal imbalances.
The global menopause market is lucrative, with statistics showing that 1bn women worldwide are affected by perimenopause or menopause.
Meanwhile Oasys Now, founded in 2021 by Nima Salami and Sara Okhuijsen, specialises in AI and cybersecurity to enable the safe reuse of health data.
According to the start-up, it is building the EU’s first AI-powered patient recruitment platform for clinical trials.
The AI-powered clinical trial management market is worth nearly $1.8bn in 2024, and the market is expected to grow to nearly $5bn before the end of the decade.
The winner of this year’s Slush 100 is slated to be announced later today (21 November).
At the two-day event that brought together 13,000 founders, investors and executives, Irish start-up Provizio announced the launch of VizioR&I, an innovative new imaging radar system built on Nvidia technology.
Ireland had a strong presence at Slush this year, with Enterprise Ireland taking a 24-company delegation to the event in Finland. The delegation this year included Manna Drone Delivery, workplace wellbeing start-up Lua Health and data security company Binarii Labs.
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