$4 Million Boost for Autism Firm

 Auticon, a IT company with its U.S. headquarters in Woodland Hills that focuses on hiring people with autism, has received $4 million from the Autism Impact Fund, a New York venture capital fund. 

David Reeve, chief marketing officer of the San Fernando Valley business, said that a big chunk of the funding will be used here. 

“The money will be spent primarily on staffing and employment of people who are on the autism spectrum,” Reeve said. 

The company’s business model has evolved over the past few years as it moved from solely focusing on quality assurance for software and apps for its clients to now taking on software development. Most of the money will go toward recruiting people with those skills, but not for any specific project.

“We are hiring autistic people with much deeper skillsets than simply the QA folks we hired a few years ago,” Reeve said.

Christopher Male, founder and managing partner for the Autism Impact Fund, said that what he liked about Auticon is the management team, its international reach and the problem that it tackles in unemployment for those with autism.

“It fits our mandate perfectly,” Male said, adding that the $4 million invested in Auticon falls in the mid to high range for the fund.

The mission of the fund is to be the investment and innovation arm of the autism community, Male continued. 

The fund follows the traditional, for-profit venture capital model, taking an ownership stake in the nine firms in its portfolio. Male would not disclose how much of an ownership percentage the fund has in Auticon.

Already experienced in VC, he started the Autism Impact Fund in April 2020. 

“We built out a group of very interesting advisors and set out to be the innovation and investment arm of the autism community given how broken it was,” Male said. 

Venture capital money is used to solve all sort of problems related to commerce and retail and employment, and now through the fund it is using dollars to target autism, Reeve said. 

“In our case, employment of autistic people. We feel the 85 percent unemployment rate among the autistic is unacceptable,” Reeve added. 

He believes that through support fromcompanies like Auticon, autistic people can fill jobs that employers are having a hard time filling, he said.