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Accessibility Pioneers
API‑First Engineering
SVG Infrastructure Architects

Our Team

We are a mission‑driven team reducing file sizes at scale to cut internet energy use and make digital content more inclusive and sustainable—backed by a team with decades of experience in design, AI, accessibility, and software engineering.


Redefining Graphic Infrastructure

Together, we’re rebuilding how graphics work so every user, device, and product benefits from smarter SVG technology.

Heather S. Neff

Founder

Tom Sikora

Chief Executive Officer

Meredith Fleig

Chief Operating Officer

Jonathan MacDonald

Chief Technology Officer

Volker Sorge, PhD

Chief Science Officer

Paul J. Neff

Director of Research

Valerie Miller

Chief Design Officer

Drew Crook

Chief Accessibility Officer

Craig Pouliot

Chief Financial Officer

Our mission: smarter graphics, smaller footprint.

Equivalent exists to make digital experiences more diverse, inclusive, and sustainable. We believe intelligent, lightweight, responsive graphics can reduce carbon footprints and unlock better design for everyone. By combining Smart SVG™ technology with thoughtful accessible‑graphic practices, we help teams change the web and beyond—one graphic at a time.

Advisors guiding the future of graphics.

Our advisory board brings deep expertise from accessibility, design systems, AI, and large‑scale platforms—helping us build Smart SVG™ technology that works in real‑world products and pipelines.

Mike Paciello

AudioEye

Matt May

Adobe

Andrew Eells

Amazon

Thomas Knoll

TechStars

Ned Thomas, PhD

MIT, Investor

Why trust our graphic infrastructure expertise?

Real credentials. Proven traction. The people behind the Smart SVG™ platform and API.

Our accessibility expertise combines technical standards knowledge with lived experience. We include W3C SVG experts, accessibility architects, and UN/Zero Project collaborators—plus team members who are blind, have low vision, and have limited arm mobility. This helps us deeply understand WCAG requirements, screen reader behavior, keyboard navigation challenges, and the real barriers that traditional graphics create for diverse users.

Our team has decades optimizing at enterprise scale: cloud and datacenter architecture experience, AI financial operations, and Fortune 100 IT partnerships. We've proven graphics can dramatically cut bandwidth costs, storage needs, and energy consumption—especially as AI image generation explodes to trillions of assets yearly—without sacrificing quality or functionality.

Our patent-pending Smart SVG™ technology comes from XML/CSS pioneers and AI/ML patent holders. It delivers production-grade scalability across all major browsers/devices, zero-downtime adaptability to user themes, and seamless handling of dynamic data/animations—all in a single, tiny file that works today without plugins or special setup.If you still don't trust us, reach out and we'll let you demo it yourself. The results speak for themselves.

Half our team are designers themselves, with lived experiences and real daily needs. We create Smart SVG™ graphics that can scale infinitely without quality loss, and respond automatically to dark mode, custom colors, and layout shifts. This ensures brand control through semantic structure (selectable text, metadata) while eliminating dev handoff friction—no alt text debates or multiple file variants needed.

Team members bring experience from Google, Disney, Workday, Paramount, Amazon, and Atos (Olympic IT partner)—roles in graphics engineering, cloud architecture, accessibility leadership, and enterprise ops. These are individual career achievements, fueling our mission at Equivalent.

Interested in our team's Smart SVG™ technology?

Tell us about your use case and we’ll explore the right way to work together—from beta testing opportunities and custom graphics support to direct integration with our Smart SVG™ API.

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Unlock adaptive Smart SVG™ graphics that cut file sizes, support accessibility initiatives, and reduce internet energy use—without redesigning your site or rewriting your code.

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