Clusiv

Luke’s earlier work on an accessibility problem exposed something much larger than one company’s software. Education and workforce technology routinely expected blind people to adapt to systems designed around sighted users. Accessibility was often treated as something to accommodate after the product had already been conceived and built.

In 2020, Luke founded Clusiv from the opposite premise. Clusiv was an accessible e-learning and onboarding platform built specifically for blind and visually impaired people, with the experience designed around the assistive technology they actually used. Screen readers weren’t an edge case the product needed to support. They were part of the starting point.

It was the same principle that had emerged from Luke’s first accessibility experience, now applied at company scale. The people closest to the problem weren’t research subjects or a customer segment being interpreted from a distance. They were employees and engineers helping determine what the solution became.

The capital didn’t prove the company would succeed. What it demonstrated was that a business built around a population conventional technology had largely treated as an accommodation could make a credible case for venture investment and institutional support.

As Clusiv grew, the problem it was trying to solve expanded with it. The company moved beyond accessible online education into technical workforce training, vocational rehabilitation and employment services, working with state agencies responsible for helping blind and visually impaired people prepare for and enter the workforce.

In 2023, the Texas Business Hall of Fame selected Luke for its Brett Wiggs Innovative Leadership Award. Its recognition highlighted the arc from his military service through nursing and software engineering to founding Clusiv, which it described as the world’s first e-learning platform built for the blind community.

Clusiv is no longer operating. Luke has publicly described the company as a failure and taken responsibility for the outcome rather than allowing its fundraising, awards and institutional backing to become a cleaner ending than the company actually had. In his closure statement, he wrote that the idea he had turned into a company ultimately didn’t work and that he owned the result.

In that same statement, Luke reported that even at Clusiv’s lowest point, the company remained seven times more effective than state agencies when measured by gain or retention of employment and maintained an NPS that never fell below 85. Those performance figures come from Luke rather than from independent reporting.

That distinction makes the ending more useful. Clusiv raised millions of dollars, attracted institutional partners, became a vendor to state governments and built a workforce heavily represented by the community it served. None of those things guaranteed that the company itself would survive. The operating results and the business outcome are two different parts of the record, and both belong here.

Clusiv was an attempt to rebuild a system around people the existing version routinely failed. Blind and visually impaired people helped shape the product, became a significant part of the workforce and participated directly in engineering and product development. That proximity gave Clusiv an operating perspective that would have been difficult to reproduce through conventional accessibility testing alone.

The model attracted more than $4 million in venture capital, accelerator backing, institutional partners and government customers. By 2023, Clusiv was reportedly an approved vendor in 23 states. None of that guaranteed the company’s survival, and Luke’s public account of its failure makes the lesson more credible rather than less.

Clusiv isn’t evidence that building close to the problem guarantees a successful company. It is evidence that doing so can reveal assumptions, opportunities and solutions that established systems miss. For Luke, that principle survived the company itself: the people living with a problem usually understand parts of it that everyone designing around them cannot see.