A Santa Clara middle schooler may be youngest person ever to receive venture capital.
8th-grader crafted Braille printer with Legos — now he’s ready for next-stage venture funding
“I asked my parents, ‘How do blind people read?’ ... They said ‘Go Google it.’ ”
Shubham Banerjee, teen entrepreneur who invented a Braille printer
In a Palo Alto conference room, Shubham Banerjee pieced together the printer he had invented at his kitchen table. In a few minutes, he would show it off to Belgian diplomats. He was a little nervous.
It was a Thursday morning, and if Shubham was lucky, he wouldn’t have to go back to school later.
The 13-year-old Santa Clara middle-schooler is said to be the youngest person ever to receive venture capital. He has been honored by the White House, given a keynote speech in Brazil and appeared on “The Queen Latifah Show.” But receiving diplomats was a first.
Shubham met the spotlight early in 2014,
after he built a Braille printer out of a Lego robotics kit and some washers his dad picked up at Home Depot. It was his science fair project. Now, his company, Braigo Labs (a portmanteau of Braille and Lego), is working to build the first cloud-enabled Braille printer, which, at $500, would cost far less than those on the market now.
The eighth-grader isn’t old enough to sign important documents — or be the president of his own company (his mom, a teacher, is), but a Google search for Braigo turns up no less than 74,100 results. The number of headlines peaked when Intel Capital invested an undisclosed amount in the company in November.
Most people who read Braille don’t own a printer that can emboss characters on a page because the cost is prohibitive, said Ike Presley, national project manager at the American Foundation for the Blind: Government programs subsidize them for those who need them for education or jobs, but most blind people are unemployed.
Expanding the market
Shubham hopes to expand the market. At $500 and with embedded translating software, Braille readers could buy a Braigo for home and a Braigo for work for less than they would have paid for a single printer before.
Still, it wasn’t your typical venture bet. Early-stage venture capitalists usually invest in companies that could make the big time — they look to suss out the next Facebook, Uber or Snapchat, hoping to cash in when they are acquired or go public. Braigo won’t have a mass market: Worldwide, 39 million people are blind. Many more are visually impaired. But in the U.S., less than 10 percent of blind people can read Braille, according to 2009 research by the American Foundation for the Blind.
But the Lego printer has brought Shubham — and Intel — more attention than most seed-stage founders and their backers could dream of.
Shubham’s dad, Neil, who works at Intel, is looking for a talent manager for his son. The keynote speaking and press requests are getting to be too much for him to manage.
“He’s got all the attention for doing good, but the life experience that you gather … he has to lead a normal life,” Neil Banerjee said.
Standing in the conference room, Shubham looked like a lankier version of a Silicon Valley founder — dressed in a plaid button-up shirt, jeans and sneakers. He entered a set of letters on a small computer wired to his first prototype, the Lego printer. A plastic Lego mechanism raised, dropped, and diligently tapped out a word on the roll of paper.
Shubham tore the sheet and handed it to an adviser, Hoby Wedler.
“The first letter is a T,” said Wedler, who is blind.
“I think you’re reading it backwards,” Shubham said. Wedler flipped the paper over. “Cat,” he said. When the dignitaries ar- rived, Shubham, who was born in Belgium, launched into the story of his company, well-rehearsed from more than a year of being told.
“In December of 2013, I was home from school. I received a flyer in the mail from a random nonprofit. It was asking for donations for the blind,” he said.
“I asked my parents, ‘How do blind people read?’ They were sort of busy at the time, so they said ‘Go Google it,’ ” Shubham said.
Anyone familiar with a TED Talk would call this an aha moment.
Expensive devices
He learned that a Braille printer for personal use typically costs between $2,000 and $4,000, plus $500 for software that translates regular text into Braille.
“I wanted to lower that,” Shubham said.
His Lego printer is opensource — its blueprints are available to anyone — but with a tiny roll of printer and the limitations of plastic blocks, it’s hardly practical for everyday use.
The prototype for Shubham’s second model, Braigo 2.0, was made of a deconstructed inkjet printer and an Intel Edison chip. Now, the Banerjees and their team are looking for a company that will manufacture the printer so they can bring it to market by November. It’s a little tricky.
“It’s not like millions of units per day, so who would be in it to pick up volume? It’s high-impact,” Banerjee said. “It’s a profitable social venture.”
The same goes for investors. Early on, Banerjee, who sits on Braigo Labs’ board of directors and serves as Shubham’s mentor, put up $35,000 of his own money. Angel investors that have approached Braigo aren’t the right fit, he said.
“Every six months, they’ll say ‘What happened to my money,’ ” Banerjee said.
Intel is not an angel investor. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than $11.4 billion in more than 1,400 companies. It’s not the first time Intel has put money behind a social cause. For example, it sponsored Project Daniel, which helps make 3-D printed prosthetic arms for victims of war in Sudan.
“The thing about Intel is they have their fingers in lots of technology pies. They often do these sort of beneficial (public relations) kind of moves,” said Joe Kempton, a research analyst at Canalys.
There isn’t good data on the subject, but larger venture firms are showing more interest in such endeavors, said Josh Cohen, a managing partner and co-founder of City Light Capital, a New York firm that invests in social entrepreneurs.
“It’s certainly not a bad thing for stakeholders of Intel to be in the business of helping the blind see, so to speak,” he said.
For the Banerjees, the bottom line is making sure that Shubham lives an ordinary teenage life — keynote speeches aside.
Building character
“We are not those Tiger Moms and Tiger Dads,” Banerjee said. “I think if, at the end of the day, you build a good character, that’s what matters.”
Shubham shares a bedroom with his 9-year-old sister. Most Sundays, he sleeps in until 10 a.m., watches some TV, finishes homework, plays video games (“Minecraft” is one of his favorites) and hangs out with friends.
“I just want to be normal,” he said. That means playing outside with friends, learning the guitar, and persuading his parents to let him try out for the football team when he enters high school next year. When he’s older, he thinks he’d like to become a surgeon or an engineer, but he’s not in any hurry to decide.
As for whether being 13 helped his company take off, “I think being young helps. If I was a 30-year-old who invented a Lego printer?” he shrugged with a smile.
At the end of his meeting in Palo Alto, Shubham presented the Belgian ambassador with a piece of art, handmade from Belgian glass.
“Shubham, what does your teacher say in school about you having this success?” asked a consul general.
“I don’t really talk about it in school,” he said. “I keep it low.”