Enabalytic Ventures
The technology in these families’ lives was never built for them.
Adapting a product designed for someone else is not the same as building outward from the person who will actually use it. The difference shows up in whether it gets used at all, whether anything in a person’s day genuinely improves — and, because a company has to survive to keep showing up, whether the people paying for it stay.
Four forces, compounding
Any one of these is hard. Together they compound — and because no system is built to absorb the result, it lands on people and the families who love them.
What we know, and where it comes from
Between 10 and 12 million Americans live with an intellectual or developmental disability, including autism, and autism alone is now identified in 1 in 31 children by age eight — up from 1 in 36 the year before. They are children in classrooms, adults who want to work and to live on their own terms, and families who have been holding this together for decades, usually with very little help. Their lives run through four systems at once, and every one of those systems is strained. The figures below describe the systems. They do not describe the people.
CDC ADDM Network, MMWR SS-74/02, April 2025 (2022 surveillance year); University of Minnesota Institute on Community Integration (RISP). Combined figure is unduplicated for diagnostic overlap — 39.6% of children identified with ASD also have an intellectual disability. IDD-only estimates run 7.4M; broader clinical definitions reach 17.3M.
Healthcare
$130B
Projected annual Medicaid spending on I/DD and autism services by 2030 — a measure of how large the system is, not of how well it serves anyone in it.
Derived from CMS National Health Expenditure projections (Keehan et al., Health Affairs, 2023) and AAIDD State of the States in IDD 2021 (Braddock et al., University of Kansas), which places 87% of public IDD funding within Medicaid.
Education
8.2M
Children and young adults, ages 3 to 21, entitled to services under IDEA. The number grew 3.8% in a single year, and the federal promise behind it has never been kept.
The Advocacy Institute analysis of U.S. Department of Education data, 2024. Autism drove roughly 40% of that increase. IDEA Part B was funded at $14.6B in FY2025 against a statutory 40% federal commitment never exceeding 18.5%.
Workforce
62%
Of provider organizations had to tell someone they could not help, because there was no one left to do the work.
ANCOR, The State of America's Direct Support Workforce Crisis 2025 (469 providers, 48 states). Turnover runs near 40–50% nationally with as many as one in eight positions vacant.
Caregiver
1.3M
People with I/DD whose main caregiver is a parent over 60. Most will outlive that parent, and most families have no plan — because no one has ever offered them one.
Pollack, Chicoine & Gullapalli Cotts, Milbank Quarterly Opinion, July 2026. Roughly three in four people with I/DD live with family caregivers.
Thesis
The same four failures, in every system a family depends on.
Healthcare, education, employment and family caregiving look like four separate markets with four separate buyers. To the person living it, they are one continuous life — and they fail in the same ways, for the same reasons. A company that solves one of these patterns well usually has a claim on more than one of them.
We are not asking anyone to accept less because the cause is worthy. Our conviction runs the other way: when the people you are building for have been overlooked this long, purpose-built wins. It gets used, it keeps customers, and it lasts. Building this well and building it right are the same job.
Tools that were never built
These systems have run for decades on people and relationships. Where software exists at all, it is old and disconnected, and it was built to record that a service happened rather than to make that service any better for the person receiving it.
Reach, not quality
The people delivering support in person are often extraordinary, and still reach only a fraction of those waiting. The limit is not skill or care. It is that a model requiring one person in one room with one other person cannot reach everyone who needs it.
First budget cut
Funding swings make multi-year planning impossible for the organizations doing this work. When money is finite it goes to paying people first, as it should — so tools are put off another year, and another, and the gap keeps widening.
Shifted responsibility
What a public system stops covering does not disappear. It lands on a person and their family as unpaid hours, lost income, and care postponed or skipped — and the cost eventually comes back to the same payer that deferred it.
Where we look
Four systems, one person.
We look for products whose core assumptions change because the person using them has an intellectual or developmental disability. A general tool with an accessibility setting bolted on is not the same thing. We also look for a real budget holder rather than a grant cycle, for a plain reason: a company that runs out of money stops helping anyone.
Care that starts with the person
Getting a diagnosis without waiting years for it. Behavioral health that is actually available. Crisis response that calms a situation instead of ending it in an emergency room or the back of a police car. Chronic conditions managed in a way that fits how someone communicates — and the analytics a health plan needs to see any of this clearly.
- Who pays — health plans, risk-bearing providers, states
- What we look at — people covered, crises prevented, care that arrives before an emergency
From IEP to employment
Assessment, individualized instruction, communication and AAC, adaptive and immersive learning — and the handoff out of school-based services into work and adult life, which is the drop-off families dread most and the one the system prepares them for least.
- Who pays — districts, state education agencies, employers
- What we look at — renewals, cost to serve each student, where young people actually land after school
Both sides of the work
Recruiting, credentialing, scheduling, documentation and supervision for direct support professionals — people who are underpaid, overextended, and leaving. And, separately, the tools that help autistic and otherwise neurodivergent adults get hired into jobs they want and stay in them.
- Who pays — provider organizations, staffing networks, employers
- What we look at — whether staff stay, whether time goes back into support, whether new hires last
Tools for the family doing the work
Care coordination, benefits and waiver navigation, respite, guardianship and future planning, and the financial tools a household needs to support someone for a lifetime — including the part no one wants to talk about, which is what happens after the parents are gone.
- Who pays — health plans, state agencies, families directly
- What we look at — whether families are still using it six months on, and how many hours it gives a caregiver back
Approach
How we work with the companies we back.
Enablement — making it possible for something to happen. Analytic — reasoning from evidence.
- Operations
- Working on margin, speed and risk early, so a company is still standing years from now — because the people relying on it cannot afford for it to disappear.
- Domain experts
- Access to people who have run services, supported these members inside a health plan, or sat on the buying side — and to self-advocates and family caregivers, so the expensive mistakes get made in a conversation rather than in someone’s life.
- Product
- Pressure-testing whether the product truly assumes this person, or assumes a general user and adapts afterward. People can tell the difference immediately, and they stop using what was not made for them.
- Commercial
- Introductions to enterprise buyers and later-stage investors, and help pricing and contracting with public payers, which works nothing like commercial procurement.
- Incubation
- Where a gap is clear and nobody is filling it, we would rather build than ask families to keep waiting.
Commitments
What we hold ourselves to.
Saying you care is cheap. These are the specific things we will and will not do, written down so founders, families and the community can hold us to them.
Nothing about them, without them
We expect people with I/DD and family caregivers to be involved in how a product is designed — and compensated for that time. Not as a testimonial at launch. As a standing part of how the company works.
Dignity is not a feature
We will not back products built to surveil, restrain or control people, or that treat a person as a problem to be managed. The test is simple: would the person using this describe it as something done with them, or to them?
The people doing the work
Direct support professionals and family caregivers are not a cost line to be optimized away. Technology here should give them their time and judgment back, not squeeze more out of them for less.
How we talk about this
We use both “people with intellectual and developmental disabilities” and “autistic people,” because preference differs across the community and both are right for someone. When we are talking with you, we follow your lead.
Team
Pete Sally
Founder
Pete has spent his career where health policy, health plans and early-stage companies meet — five years on Capitol Hill through the rewriting of the health insurance market, then inside a Blue Cross plan implementing it, then as co-founder of two venture funds. He also serves as a Director of The Arc of Massachusetts.
Why this work, in his own words: [to come].
- Seae VenturesCo-founder and General Partner of a first-time venture fund backing companies — in data, digital health and AI — working to close health and wealth gaps in communities the market has passed over.
- Zaffre InvestmentsFounding team member and Director at the corporate venture subsidiary of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, with board service across the portfolio.
- BCBS MassachusettsGovernment affairs. Worked with federal officials on proposed health regulation, then analyzed and implemented the new coverage and market-reform requirements from inside a health plan — the same reforms, seen from the side that has to actually operate them.
- U.S. CongressHealthcare Legislative Assistant to Congressman Stephen F. Lynch, 2005 to 2010 — five years spanning the most significant rewrite of the health insurance market in a generation. Office lead on the coverage and market-reform legislation as it was drafted, argued over, amended and moved through Congress.
- The Arc of MassachusettsDirector. The Arc works alongside people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including autism, and their families — on the things that decide a life: school, work, housing, healthcare and the right to make your own choices.
- EducationBA in History and Political Science, Union College (NY). MBA, Carroll School of Management, Boston College.
Contact
Start a conversation.
Founders building in these four areas. People who have done the work — in classrooms, in provider organizations, inside health plans. Self-advocates and family caregivers with a view on any of this, including where we have it wrong. All welcome. We read everything.