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Making Space recruits underrepresented candidates, trains them through an accelerator, and places them with corporate partners as equal hires.
ENTRY ANGLES
Recruit from overlooked talent pools (disability community, disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, underrepresented groups) and provide skills training/mentorship · Build talent pipelines connecting underserved populations to remote work opportunities in developed markets · Create mentor-matching platforms that build both skills and professional referrals for candidates from non-traditional backgrounds
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Talent recruitment and sourcing from non-traditional pools, Skills training and mentorship program design, Job placement and employer matching
Making Space's mission is to "create the future of work with equal opportunity for everyone."
That includes people with disabilities – though the founders resist that framing. Their view is that "equal for all" means exactly that, without attaching labels to anyone.
To get there, the startup recruits corporate partners across industries. The arrangement: partner companies open equal career pathways, while Making Space runs something like an accelerator – recruiting, selecting, and training candidates with disabilities for those roles.
The startup now has more than 10 such partners, and it deliberately targets large, well-known companies to bring mainstream visibility to the movement.
Netflix is among them – Making Space helps the streamer find and train graphic designers with disabilities. NBC Sports is another partner, where Making Space sources and develops sports commentators from the same candidate pool.
To amplify the media dimension, Making Space partnered last summer with Reese Witherspoon's production company Hello Sunshine to produce documentary films about career success stories of people with disabilities.
The goal is a cultural shift: disabilities are not barriers to career achievement or self-realization – and that message needs to land with both job seekers and employers alike.
Making Space was founded last summer and has just announced a $2 million seed round.
On one side of the equation: a persistent shortage of skilled workers.
On the other: 26% of American adults – 61 million people – live with some form of disability.
Yet employers have historically been reluctant to hire them. In 2018, only 29% of Americans with disabilities aged 16–64 were employed, versus 75% of their non-disabled peers. Overall, unemployment among people with disabilities runs roughly twice as high. UK data show the same pattern: even as headline unemployment falls, the gap between disabled and non-disabled employment rates stays stubbornly at roughly 2x.
The most striking finding comes from Accenture: companies that actively hire people with disabilities outperform their peers – 28% higher revenue and 30% better margins. The likely explanation isn't that employees with disabilities are inherently more productive, but that businesses with genuinely inclusive hiring practices are simply better-managed companies overall.
Making Space isn't the first here. A [related review](/review/tri-novyh-vozmozhnosti-dlja-26-vzroslogo-naselenija) covered Inclusively early in 2023 – a startup doing similar work, connecting candidates with disabilities to employers and helping those employers provide appropriate working conditions. Inclusively takes a lower-profile approach compared to Making Space, but it has raised $19.9 million including a $13 million round after that review.
The core problem remains a shortage of skilled workers. Many companies are simply poaching talent from each other, which drives up wages and erodes retention.
The more systematic answer is to source candidates from consistently overlooked pools and prepare them for real roles. A few approaches worth noting:
Making Space and Inclusively recruit from the disability community. Tangent ([related review](/review/sistemnoe-reshenie-bolshoj-problemy)), which raised €1 million, helps people from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds in the UK land jobs in tech sales by connecting them with mentors who build the skills and referrals needed – sometimes at the mentor's own company.
Code First Girls ([covered here](/review/zhirnyj-kusok-rynka-obrazovanija)) trains women in the UK to become software engineers – a group dramatically underrepresented in the field – and raised £4.5 million to do it.
Microverse ([related review](/review/kuriruemoe-samoobrazovanie)) teaches coding to students in Africa and Latin America, then places them in remote jobs at companies in the US and Europe. It raised $19.7 million, part of it after the original review.
The pattern is consistent: find an underserved talent pool, build the pipeline, match them to real demand. The interesting question is always: which pool, trained in what, placed where? The combinations that haven't been tried yet are where the opportunity lives.