When Shubham Banerjee asked his dad how blind people read, his dad absently told him to go ahead and ‘Google it’. A year later, the now 13-year-old boy has come a long way and is now the founder of Palo Alto startup Braigo Labs, which aims at becoming the first vendor of low-cost, compact Braille printers. According to Reuters, this invention has even caught the eyes of Intel, who has decided to fund an undisclosed amount into his company to further his efforts.
Banerjee lives in San Jose, California and has got all the funding for his initial basic research from his parents. He started making headlines earlier this year with a homegrown $349.99 Braille printer that he made using Lego parts from a Mindstorm robotics development kit. He decided to call it Braigo, and the printer was less expensive than other Braille printers, which typically go for over $1,000.
The printer since then has traveled to many exhibitions and even ended up on display at the Maker Faire held at the White House in June. Noticed by Intel, Braigo v2.0, uses Intel’s low-power Edison development board, and was also demonstrated at the Intel Developer Forum in September. Intel executive Mike Bell gave Banerjee the news of the company’s plans to invest in Braigo Labs when he came for a conference to India to highlight the use of the Edison chip.
Banerjee plans to use the money to build a better prototype of the printer, hire engineers and test it with more groups for the blind. Banerjee also does not plan to ditch school for his endeavor and reiterates, “It’s an after school thing.”
