Amandipp Singh didn’t realize he was conducting market research when he started working on his PhD application.
Singh, born with partial vision, intended to be an academic and wanted to study how technology could be used to improve inclusion opportunities in employment. While feeling out his thesis topic, he connected with professors, think tanks, and people involved in the federal government’s Disability Inclusion Action Plan to identify the pain points of inclusion initiatives for both employers and employees.
Amandipp Singh
“Beyond borders, beyond languages, beyond disabilities. That’s the term we came up with to define our success.”
Enabled Talent
“Having worked at the grassroots level with non-profits, education institutions, and the government, I knew the challenges that are there firsthand,” Singh told BetaKit in an interview. “All of them are trying to do their part …but their efforts and resources are segregated.”
Singh came up with a hypothetical centralized platform that could address those pain points by matching disabled employees with job listings that were accessible to them, and vice versa for employers. But the people Singh spoke with about the idea kept telling him to explore it himself.
“I would have a list of excuses: that I don’t have tech company experience, I haven’t done anything prior, I know the hypothetical concept but I don’t know how it would work, I don’t have tech resources or funding,” Singh said. When 90 percent of the people he spoke with in the disability community suggested the same thing, however, he decided to pursue it.
Launched this past January, Brampton, Ont.-based Enabled Talent is an AI-powered employment platform that helps organizations hire disabled people by making the process more accessible. Singh said the platform addresses major barriers within human resources (HR) departments, which don’t always know how to match disabilities to roles or how to fulfill accommodation requests.
Disabled job seekers can create a profile outlining their employment needs and accommodation requirements, and prospective employers can create a job posting to find talent compatible with their needs while receiving help with their accommodations. Additionally, Enabled Talent provides a voice-guided assistant for blind users, digital sign language interpretation tools for deaf users, and an AI career coach that claims to help neurodivergent users with task planning, emotional regulation, and goal setting.
Singh told BetaKit he is trying to “build the world’s most inclusive talent platform for people with disabilities.” His hope is to make it easier for disabled people to navigate the day-to-day of their job based on the feedback of other disabled people.
Enabled Talent’s team consists of co-founders Singh and Jeby James, four engineers, and 18 interns who provide input on making the tools as accessible as possible. Singh added that he wants the platform to be usable for everyone no matter their background or circumstances.
“Beyond borders, beyond languages, beyond disabilities,” Singh said. ”That’s the term we came up with to define our success.”
Singh has found decent success pitching the platform to organizations so far, and claims to have onboarded 8,000 users and 12 organizations. That traction was aided by the startup’s acceptance into incubators like AWS for Startups, Microsoft for Startups, and the Nvidia Inception Program, he said. Enabled Talent is also performing a pilot project in Ghana as part of the UNICEF Startup Lab, and recently secured a partnership with Algoma University to further develop Eynable, Enabled Talent’s AI-powered voice tool for the visually impaired.
Originally a Google Chrome extension, Eynable helps perform virtual tasks like send emails or set meetings through voice commands. Singh hopes the tool can eventually improve on often-neglected accessibility functions like alt text, which describes digital images for the visually impaired.
Singh said that Enabled Talent is planning a “full-scale launch” sometime in September, hopefully followed by a pre-seed fundraising round. Singh said he found many disabled people had “given up hope” for proper accessibility tools, so he wanted to take the time to iterate through a “co-design process” that garnered feedback until the tools were finished.
“If Enabled Talent comes into the picture and brings another hope but is not able to fulfill it, that means we are doing the same thing all the others have done,” Singh said. “We wanted to make sure that, before we bring this into the limelight, anyone can use it so we don’t end up disappointing them.”
Feature image courtesy Amandipp Singh.