On the "Built Different" panel at London Tech Week
On Wednesday 10 June, our founder Valerie Oyiki spoke on "Built Different: How Disabled Founders Are Redefining Innovation" at the EQL:Lounge (Tech She Can) stage at London Tech Week, alongside Coté Auil (Global Disability Innovation Hub), Mahdi Shariff and Ammar Boukhemkhem.
The identity that compounds
The panel kept returning to one question in different words: what is it actually like to build when more than one part of your identity sits outside the default founder. For Valerie that's three things at once, being Black, a woman and neurodivergent, and none of them arrive on their own. They compound, and the data backs that up.
"I am building this as a neurodivergent Black woman in an industry that was not built for me. I am not the obvious founder. I am the right one." Valerie's line from the panel, and the one the rest of the session kept circling back to.
How she tackles it
Not by fighting for a bigger slice of odds that don't move. Rather than spend energy on numbers she can't shift, Valerie goes straight to building relationships and getting in front of customers directly, revenue and traction first, funding as whatever follows.
The other part is radical openness. She's fully open about being neurodivergent and about what building like this actually costs, because the vulnerability is the point, not something to manage around. It shows up in the product too: Koala exists because the tool has to adapt to the person, never the other way round, the same principle she asked rooms full of investors and operators to extend to how they think about who gets to build.
Why there's no better time to build
The stats above are real, and they were never going to be the whole story. What's changed is what one founder can now do without a raise behind her. Product design, engineering, even a working AI layer, used to require a funded team standing between an idea and a real product. Increasingly, that access runs through the tools themselves rather than through who gets a cheque.
That shift is available to any founder whose identity has historically sat outside where the funding goes, which is exactly the point Valerie made on stage: the barriers around funding are real and worth fixing, but there's a genuine amount of building that doesn't have to wait for them to move.
