I’m thrilled to share that we’ve made a recent investment in Patrol.ai, which officially came out of stealth mode today.  You can check out their announcement here. 

One of the most rewarding aspects of meeting founders is walking away having learned something new or unexpected. That’s exactly what happened when I first met Sam Rotner and Nico van Wijk at Patrol. They opened my eyes to the growing challenges surrounding ADA compliance lawsuits and the shadow industry that exploits scaling businesses at high volume. The statistics Sam shared were staggering: thousands of web accessibility lawsuits, growing at over 40% annually, with no signs of slowing down. And these have nothing to do with true customer access, but just extracting rents from businesses because real solutions don’t exist. 

At first, this seemed hard to believe. To better understand the issue, I reached out to several friends and founders who operate within Patrol’s ICP. Every single one of them had encountered this problem. It’s a sneaky, pervasive challenge that’s surprisingly common—and painful to deal with. One founder described it as “a rite of passage for every e-commerce site,” while another admitted “we think about this problem way more than we should.”

This moment in time is also pivotal because AI agents are presenting new ways to solve long-standing issues like this with much greater automation and fidelity. Historically, web accessibility problems have been addressed with agencies or sub-optimal overlay widgets—solutions that consistently fall short.

For Sam, this problem wasn’t new. During his time as an investor at OpenView, he explored the Shopify and e-commerce enablement ecosystems in search of a viable solution but came up empty-handed. That’s when he decided to team up with Nico and build the solution themselves.

Today, Patrol is making its product generally available. If you’re a Shopify brand or a small business looking to expand your target audience through accessibility and ADA compliance, Patrol offers a best-in-class solution. Although they’re just getting started, I’m incredibly impressed with how much this team has accomplished. Their product is outstanding, their team is firing on all cylinders (and hiring!), and they’re pursuing a big-picture master plan that we’ll keep under wraps for now. 😊

Congratulations to the Patrol team on their successful raise and launch. I’m beyond excited to be part of this journey and can’t wait to see what’s ahead!