Innovation Insights: Cephable

Were highlighting Cephable this week! During our most recent Disability Tech Talk, Founder and CEO Alex Dunn proudly shared that 75% of Cephable team members identify as having a disability. So along with their mission, theyre a majority-disabled company in how we build everything — from how we do our marketing to how we interact with our community, how we actually do our engineering — it takes it takes an entire community to build something like this and it's always been a part of my product lifecycle development to understand what a person's problems are in developing solutions. I'm not in the business of developing solutions without problems because ultimately those don't succeed.”

Check out more of what he shared in a Q&A with the global Remarkable team earlier this year.

What is your startup and who is the target market?
Cephable is a platform that gives users the ability to augment and control their technology in ways that work best for them using voice controls, face expressions, body gestures, virtual buttons, and more.

For businesses, we provide the ability to create new levels of equitable access to their platforms and services while also being able to spotlight their services to our users as a new accessible place to be whether it be a game, a bank, a streaming platform, or productivity tool.

How have you engaged end-users in the development of Cephable?
Our platform is built for people with disabilities and as well as with them.

From the beginning of our R&D to each feature implementation, we involve our community of users, testers, and supporters to provide as much feedback and review before we even get to the design stage. We have a group of about 2000 people of varying ages and abilities who participate in that constant feedback loop.

We even talk with a number of our users about our naming conventions and brand naming.

What have you achieved since launching? Can you share some customer success stories or an accomplishment that youre proud of?
Weve built an amazing team of icons in this industry that share in our vision of equitable access for everyone. Weve also introduced thousands of users to our platform who love and use Cephable every day.

The 450 characters cant do the number of quotes and amazing feedback weve received justice, but heres one that is close to encapsulating it from Aaron Price at AbleGamers:

The current adaptive gaming scene is in a messy hodgepodge of tech. Everyones disability requires a unique solution. If a person with disabilities wants to maximize their gaming potential, their controls often necessitates a mixture of assistive technology pulled from many different avenues that dont logically correlate when people think about videogames. For individuals with disabilities, this makes the process of gaming very confusing, extremely expensive, and time-consuming.

Cephable controls have taken huge strides to combine that patchwork of assistive tech that allows disabled gamers to control their videogames into one device all while including an easy-to-understand interface.

What sets your startup apart from competitors?
Theres a few things that set us apart:

1. We provide many different augmented controls that adapt to our users over time, prioritizing personalization and abilities over the technology.
2. Our speech recognition and computer vision models for face expression and body gesture controls also run entirely offline to ensure the fastest performance and absolute privacy
3. Our users pay nothing to use these new levels of accessible controls. Our business model does not implement a disability tax” and instead removes it.
4. For businesses, we provide new levels of accessibility beyond the box check of compliance. We provide personalized controls for each person so they can bring their Cephable profile” to your apps, services, games, and more.
5. We help drive new customers to our partners by introducing our users to the services that are accessible to them and where they can bring their profile of controls.

Where do you want your startup to be in one month, one year, 10 years? What do you need to get there?

In one month, we want to be in market with our production apps that have been tested by thousands of users with varying abilities around the world to help drive further adoption by users who are excited to use these new controls.

In one year, we 'd like to be a household name in the world of accessibility for people with disabilities and integrated into dozens of services where we provide massive value to both our customers and our users.

In 10 years, we want to be a household name everywhere and be a publicly traded company that the world is excited to root for while we continue to innovate in the ways that people interact with technology while being able to say we've already made a massive impact on the accessibility and inclusion space.

What does it mean to you to be part of the Remarkable community?
It means being part of a community of people who all wake up every day driven to make a difference in the world. Whether that difference be to a single person or to everyone, were surrounded by a group of people who want to change lives and leave a positive impact on the world.

What advice would you give to aspiring disability tech entrepreneurs?
My biggest piece of advice is to build everything at every step with your users first. They should be top of mind at every step of the way and involved in those steps too. From concept and design to implementation and iteration.

If youre building for people with disabilities, build it with as many people with disabilities as you can manage. Everyone's experience in this world is entirely different – lean into that instead of shying away from that.

Also dont just build a product, build a business. A proper go to market and business model that scales will help you reach your goals of impact far more than just a product will.

Want to learn more about Cephable? Check out our Disability Tech Talk and Changing Whats Possible episodes with Alex Dunn. You can also follow Cephable on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube.