Lego Braille Printer - A 13-year-old boy in California has made history by being the youngest person to receive venture capital from Intel after the company invested an unspecified sum into his startup Braigo Labs, which creates cheap and lightweight Braille printers for visually impaired people.
Shubham Banerjee, a fourth grader, created the Braille printer as part of a science project in 2014 using a Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit and went on to win the fair at the county level.
When Shubam's science project started getting lots of media coverage and blind people started making enquiries about it, his father Niloy Banerjee, who works as an engineer at Intel, helped his son create a company and provided him a seed investment of $35,000. But since Shubam is too young to run the company, his mother is currently the CEO of Brigo Labs.
"We as parents started to get involved more, thinking that he's on to something and this innovation process has to continue," Banerjee told AP.
This investment and support enabled Shubam to build a more sophisticated version of his Braigo (Braille+Lego) device. The new Braigo 2.0 was built with the same Lego Mindstorm kit, but also included parts of a desktop printer and a newly released Intel chip. The Braigo 2.0 can covert electronic data into tactile Braille text and print from a mobile device.
Intel executives got wind of Shubam's invention and were so impressed that they decided to inject capital into the company last year. Reports indicate that the investment will be used to expand Braigo Labs by hiring professional engineers to deigsn Braille printers based on Shubam's blueprint.
"He's solving a real problem, and he wants to go off and disrupt an existing industry. And that's really what it's all about," Intel's director of Inventor Platforms Edward Ross said.
A Braigo prototype is expected to be tested this summer before the product is officially released later in the year.
Shubam says his goal is to have a lot of blind people using his Braigo printer. Experts say given the steep price of a real Braille printer, this is not farfetched.
