Many businesses serving the EU’s 450 million consumers are now facing a new challenge: complying with the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which came into effect in June. Much like the GDPR before it, the EAA has sent companies scrambling to update their websites, e-commerce platforms, and digital services to meet accessibility standards. Despite similar regulations existing in the U.S., many organizations are still playing catch-up.

“One thing that surprised us was companies, even massive companies, coming to us two weeks before [the deadline] saying, ‘Oh, we didn’t know anything about this,’” said Irish entrepreneur Cormac Chisholm.

His startup, DevAlly, is one of the first to harness advanced technology to help businesses detect and fix accessibility issues efficiently. The platform assists organizations in complying with the EAA, which imposes significant fines on non-compliant new products and services, while giving existing ones until 2030 to meet the requirements.

Founded in 2024, DevAlly performs detailed audits to uncover accessibility barriers—such as videos without captions or poorly labeled images—on corporate websites. It tracks customer-reported issues, builds actionable roadmaps for companies, and generates comprehensive accessibility reports.

While traditional human-led audits remain valuable, Chisholm believes such methods can’t scale fast enough for modern product development. DevAlly combines AI and large language models (LLMs) with accessibility expertise to automate testing and issue tracking, seamlessly integrating compliance into the product development lifecycle.

This innovative approach echoes the success of cybersecurity compliance firm Vanta, valued at $2.45 billion, which also leveraged automation to meet growing regulatory demands.

Thanks to increasing regulatory pressure and heightened awareness of digital inclusivity, DevAlly recently secured €2 million in pre-seed funding (around $2.3 million) — signaling strong investor confidence in the company’s mission to make the digital world accessible to everyone.