Founder: Alex Dunn
Founding: 2023
Mission: Nothing About Us Without Us
Employees: 8 & ~20% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & ~$5M raised
Investors: Difference Partners, Founder Collective, Hyperplane, Triple Impact, Voicify & Scott Belsky, Bret Bowerman, and Jason Fields
Key Customers: Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Accenture, AAA gaming studios
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $20M – $40M (assuming average equity dilution in the $5M Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Cephable is a personal, private, and accessible AI platform that enables users to control their digital devices through adaptive voice commands, head movements, facial expressions, virtual buttons, and AI task automation. Designed to enhance accessibility and inclusivity, Cephable allows individuals to navigate and interact with technology on their terms, for work, gaming, or everyday tasks.
Cephable was founded in 2023 by Alex Dunn, an applied machine learning engineer who was formerly the Chief Product Officer at Voicify. A tinkerer by trade, he saw that his younger brother, who has a disability, was unable to keep up with friends while gaming, and falling behind with the technology at school. Alex wanted to provide him with better tools so he could play Minecraft & Roblox online with his friends, and excel in school.
When the pandemic hit, he used his spare time to research & build exploratory speech recognition tools. Entering hackathons, he used the winnings to bootstrap an initial version of Cephable (fka Enabled Play). Alex started posting online about linking voice commands to gaming consoles via a speech recognition device instead of a controller or keyboard & mouse.
Almost immediately, major gaming publishers and executives from multi-national banks reached out about integrating Cephable tools into their digital experiences. Alex had uncovered a very large opportunity.
Globally there are more than 1.3B people (15-20% of the global population) with disabilities who have an annual discretionary spending power of $13T according to the World Economic Forum (src). This includes cognitive, mobility, hearing, vision & other restrictions that prevent millions of people from enjoying games & digital experiences.
Can you imagine not being able to access an ATM to take out some cash? Or fire a tortoise shell at Wario on the Rainbow Road racetrack? Or how about just logging onto the computer to send an email?
Cephable is enabling a new digital customer via their software platform which launched publicly in August 2023 to solve the “disability tax,” an additional cost that many people with disabilities have to pay for adaptive tech. They are on a mission to build inclusive experiences for individuals with disabilities from gaming to finance and beyond so anyone can enjoy the digital experiences the rest of the population knows & loves. Their team even gives their personal platform (for non-commercial use) away entirely for free.
Using voice prompts, head movements, or virtual buttons their algorithms will connect visual & audio prompts through a computer or mobile phone’s camera & microphone to the computer interface. Cephable will even run offline on the device itself. Go ahead and try their controls right in your browser if you’d like to see it for yourself!
Today they’ve built innovative, responsive algorithms that are adaptive to visual & audio commands across languages and commands. Next comes the fun part. They’re developing AI models trained to understand how users interact with their PCs and apps so commands will become more predictive and run in a personalized, private offline sequence that goes beyond core accessibility and taps into productivity at large.
In the summer of 2024, Cephable announced partnerships with Microsoft & Qualcomm to build “out of the box” PC experiences which will include Cephable controls integrated into OEM (original equipment manufacturing) devices like Lenovo, HP & Dell computers & tablets.
These large scale enterprise partnerships will take the startup from 10s of thousands of users to 10s of millions in the coming quarters. Cephable is also working on a new reseller partner program and in late stage conversations with major gaming publishers about integrating their algorithms into newly developed (not yet released) titles to bundle with Cephable Professional.
Through both subscription & licensing agreements, depending on the implementation, Cephable is onboarding “tranches of users” to build better-integrated experiences with pretty straightforward application features – single sign-on, team management, and sharing controls. Every user gets their own Cephable account they can then link to various games, apps, or even banks building the flywheel of user growth.
This fast-growing Boston-based startup grew their end user base from early adoption to its 2024 year-end user base by more than 10,000x. They’re expecting to grow another 10,000x in 2025, turbocharged by their newly established enterprise relationships.
They are closing in on seven figures of annual revenue in the 1H of 2025, with their average Enterprise pipeline deal size now approaching seven figures too! Next year they will plan to bring on more engineers, and marketing resources, and grow their customer success & sales operations teams.
Alex is excited about the unbelievable team they’ve assembled thus far, working with some of the biggest companies in the world as an emerging startup. When they show Microsoft & HP teams what they’re building and with less than 10 people, eyes get wide. It’s a team punching well above their weight!
Operators to Know:
- Jason Fields, COO
- Jon Campbell, Director of Engineering
- Cordellia Yokum, Senior Software Development Engineer
- Shristi Chitlangia, Software Engineer
- Julia Franklin, Chief Learning Officer
- Alexa Orban, Director of Marketing Communications
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Cephable team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- What are the major focus areas for 1H 2025?
- How will the team balance the various priorities between Enterprise partnerships, core feature development, and overall roadmap priorities?
- What is the long term vision for the company?
- What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2025 / teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Cephable you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more users into the digital & touchless age. All consumers & enterprises applaud your efforts. See you around town!