Building the Internet for Everyone: Amit Borsok on scaling with purpose | the blueprint S2 E3

An episode of the blueprint hosted by Vanessa de Waele, Group Sustainability & Legal Director at team.blue, featuring Amit Borsok, Co-Founder and CEO of team.blue brand Accessiway, in which they discuss what it takes to build digital accessibility at scale, and why AI still needs human expertise to scale accessibility.

A year ago, Vanessa de Waele joined the Accessiway team for one of their "Dinner in the Dark" events: a four-course meal shared with colleagues in complete darkness. The evening started with excitement, everyone talking a little louder than usual, as though not being able to see also meant not being able to hear. But as it went on, she found herself overstimulated, retreating into her own bubble. Surrounded by colleagues, she felt alone. 

"That hit me as a feeling," she says. It is a feeling Amit Borsok has built an entire company around. Amit co-founded Accessiway in Turin in 2021, with three people and one idea: make the internet work for everyone. In December 2024, the company joined team.blue. Vanessa sat down with Amit to talk about what that decision really involved, and where digital accessibility is heading next. 

About Accessiway: Accessiway is a Turin-founded digital accessibility company. Since joining team.blue, it has expanded its activity from Italy into France, Austria and Germany, scaling to a multi-market European operator now serving more than 2,000 brands across over 30 countries and growing revenue 91% year-on-year. Accessiway's platform brings the full accessibility lifecycle into one place: finding issues across websites, apps and documents, remediating them with expert-validated fixes, and continuously monitoring conformance over time.

Vanessa: Was the social mission there from day one, or did it find Accessiway along the way? 

Amit: It evolved quickly, but Accessiway wasn't founded as a charity project. We're business people who wanted to build something that also does good. People with disabilities hold real leadership positions inside the company, including our Chief Vision Officer, and that's what has driven the mission since. Responsibility for digital exclusion sits with the rest of us, not with people with disabilities. That's why, whenever we demo our platform, we show clients exactly what it's like for a blind user on a screen reader trying to use an inaccessible website. Without that, people don't grasp how big the problem really is. 

Vanessa: You joined team.blue in December 2024. What was the reality behind that decision? 

Amit: We'd bootstrapped from day one, funded month to month by the co-founders. We grew fast and were profitable at points, but scaling further meant competing against better-funded players, and that meant raising capital. We had two options on the table: a classic private equity investor, or a strategic partner already inside the industry. What made team.blue different was the intention behind it — access to their 3.3 million clients and shared capabilities like HR, marketing and AI, but with an explicit commitment that we'd keep our own identity and run our own show. Out of fourteen people on my leadership team, only one voted for the alternative. 

Vanessa: Many founders worry that joining a bigger group means losing autonomy. Was that a concern for you? 

Amit: There's always a fear of change. We didn't know how much it would ask of us, or what would happen if we missed our targets. But there's a question that guides me constantly, and it's part of our culture at Accessiway: what is the goal? If the goal is to make the web accessible, and that coincides with building a good business, the decision becomes much easier to see, even while the fear is still there. 

Vanessa: What's been the biggest adjustment to living inside a larger group? 

Amit: Learning to say no. After an explosive 2025, people across the group kept coming to me with new ideas, without always seeing what it took to drive that growth. At some point I had to start telling people, including my own board, that some things simply had to wait. On the operational side, the hardest part was handing finance over to the central team. The system migrations were technical and unglamorous, but necessary, and it's freed up time for us to focus on what we do best. 

Vanessa: What value have you found in the team.blue founder community? 

Amit: Being a founder, especially a CEO, is lonely. You carry a level of stress most people can't fully understand unless they've lived it. Sitting in a room with thirty other founders who've each built a company from zero to seven figures in revenue creates an automatic level of respect and empathy. That shared experience opens up conversations you can't have anywhere else, and real collaboration grows out of it. 

Vanessa: With the European Accessibility Act now in force, where do you see the real ambition for web accessibility heading? 

Amit: Two extremes have both fallen short. Manual accessibility work is thorough, but doesn't scale. Automated widget solutions scale but sacrifice quality. The future is understanding that humans aren't going anywhere — they need to be amplified by technology, not replaced by it. We call it the "cyborg" approach. AI can solve what it's capable of solving, but people need to stay in the loop, so companies get a solution that actually fits their organisation. If we can prove accessibility is a positive ROI rather than a burden, more companies will adopt it because it helps them — not because regulation forces them to. 

Vanessa: What's your view on vibe coding, given the AI literacy gap you're describing? 

Amit: It's an amazing tool, but it needs to be used responsibly. We're seeing an exponential increase in the speed of generating code, and that's created a real problem around code review — one estimate put the cost of bug-fixing after code reached production at $2.5 trillion in the US in 2022 alone. It can cost around a hundred dollars to catch a bug before production, and up to ten thousand after. My recommendation is to build the right governance into these tools by design, rather than waiting for regulation to catch up. 

Vanessa: What's the first thing you'd tell a founder considering going international with a partner like team.blue? 

Amit: It's a great idea, but you need to understand what it means. team.blue invests in the best company in each vertical across Europe, so joining comes with real responsibility to maintain that standard. If you come in wanting to leverage team.blue to grow, with the authority to guide your own ship while team.blue supports you, this is the best place in Europe to join — and that's from direct experience. 

The full episode is available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.