Michael Bervell builds accessibility software because he has spent his whole life at the intersection of humanity, technology, and disability.
It started in sixth grade, when he founded Hugs for Ghana, an entirely student-run nonprofit that went on to reach more than 500,000 young people. As a Ghanaian-American raised in Washington, he was often the only Black kid in his school or his classes. That became the fire to make change globally.
He studied philosophy at Harvard, a master's in communication at UW, and earned his MBA at Harvard Business School, where he was elected Section G President. Along the way he became the youngest person ever elected a director of the Harvard Alumni Association, wrote a bestselling book, and worked on accessibility problems at Google and the United Nations before he had ever started a company.
TestParty came out of his HBS dorm. The thesis was simple and, at the time, unpopular: digital accessibility was the next real wave of legal innovation. AI and LLMs were the story everyone was telling, but he believed the intersection of law and technology was bigger than any single tech wave. He bet the company on it. When the European Accessibility Act passed, it codified in Europe what he had already been building toward.
He doesn't come from a traditional founder network. He built one. Every deal, every partnership, every customer came from showing up and doing the work.