Rylo raises $85 million to make accessible communication a product people can rely on

A rebrand from Nagish, an $85 million raise, and a push beyond captioning mark a wider shift: accessibility built around people, not compliance.

For decades, communication tools for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community were designed to meet a regulatory minimum rather than a real need. Relay services were slow. Captioning was an add-on. The result was technology that satisfied a requirement but that few people actually wanted to use.

The scale of that gap is significant. An estimated 48 million Americans live with some degree of hearing loss, and worldwide the figure exceeds 1.5 billion, projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050. Yet fewer than one in five people who could benefit from assistive devices use them. The need is enormous, and the tools built to meet it have long fallen short.

Rylo, formerly Nagish, was built to change that. Its FCC-certified platform delivers real-time captioning and text-to-speech for phone calls and in-person conversations, free to the people who use it. Rather than treating accessibility as a feature bolted onto someone else's product, Rylo makes communication itself the product.

"For decades, the communication industry treated deaf and hard-of-hearing people as an afterthought," said Tomer Aharoni, CEO and Co-Founder of Rylo.

The rebrand from Nagish to Rylo captures the ambition. The new name bridges "relay" and "rely": a deliberate move from the language of compliance to the language of dependability.

The timing is not accidental. Advances in AI have made it possible to deliver accurate, real-time communication support at a quality and cost that were out of reach only a few years ago. That shift turns accessibility from a constrained, subsidised service into a genuine consumer-grade product.

Rylo is using its latest funding to expand well beyond captioning. Building on its 2025 acquisition of Sign.mt, the company is developing sign language translation, alongside workplace accessibility, speaker identification, sentiment analysis, and real-time fraud detection. The throughline is a single communication layer designed around how the community actually lives and works.

Vertex Ventures Israel's perspective

Rylo's $85 million round included participation from Vertex Ventures Israel. The round brings Rylo's total funding to more than $100 million.

Vertex Ventures Israel, an existing investor in the company, has continued its backing through this round.

"Communication accessibility has been underserved for decades, and AI is finally making it possible to close that gap at scale. Rylo has turned that opportunity into a product with real traction, and we're proud to keep backing the team as they expand from captioning into a full communication platform," said Aviad Ariel, General Partner, Vertex Ventures Israel.

For Vertex Ventures Israel, the conviction rests as much on the team as on the technology.

"What sets Rylo apart is a mission-driven team deeply focused on a real customer need: making communication easier for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community. The founders have consistently achieved their goals while continuing to innovate and push forward, and we are confident they will keep doing exactly that in this next chapter, from captioned calls to AI, mobile, and a broader communication platform," said Tami Bronner, General Partner, Vertex Ventures Israel.

The opportunity ahead is large and, for too long, has been poorly served. As AI reshapes what assistive communication can do, the companies that succeed will be those that build around people first. Rylo's next chapter, from captioned calls to sign language translation and beyond, is a bet that accessible communication can be both genuinely useful and genuinely wanted. On the evidence so far, it is a bet worth making.