This company was built twice.

In April 2016, Oliver Thornton founded Coding Autism — a company built on a simple conviction: autistic adults deserved a real path into technology careers, not a day program. That year it won the grand prize at California Lutheran University’s New Venture Competition. In April 2017 it raised $52,855 in a StartSomeGood crowdfunding campaign, and launched the ASPIRE Web Development Immersive with coding partner Bottega. The launch drew national press — StartupBeat, Training Industry, PRNewswire, The Mighty, and more.

It produced real outcomes. One graduate secured a $65,000-a-year role at PeerStreet — a placement Oliver described on the record in a 2019 Voyage LA interview. Another student, eight weeks into the program, wrote his own first-person account of the experience for Autism Speaks. Real training, real placement, real people speaking in their own words.

And it taught hard lessons. The technology to assess and train at scale didn’t exist yet. The employer demand wasn’t urgent enough. The families who most needed the program often couldn’t pay for it, and the payers who could weren’t at the table. Coding Autism proved the model could work — and proved exactly what was missing to make it work at scale.

Both missing pieces exist now. AI created an employer with an urgent, growing need for precise human judgment — and created the tools to assess, train, and support people at scale. The ASD Company is the second build: same mission, built on everything the first one taught, with a claims standard the first era of this industry never held itself to.