By Robin Lempel
Talk about a child genius! Shubham Banerjee, a 13-year-old, has created a Lego printer — which he came up with as a science fair project — that can print in Braille. That’s right. Legos.
After Intel Corp invested in his startup, Braigo Labs (which combines the words Braille and Lego), Banerjee has high hopes. He wants to sell the printers for $350; similar products normally go for at least $2,000. That would make the machines available for a much larger group of consumers.
His goal is to make printers more accessible for blind people. With Braille printers normally costing so much and weighing more than 20 pounds, they really aren’t the most accessible product you can get. So he got to work creating a product using his Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit, and later a desktop printer and an Intel computer chip. He created Braigo 2.0.
After coming up with the idea for his science project, Banerjee got a $35,000 investment from his dad, who works for Intel. And then Intel themselves ended up investing in his startup. “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,” Edward Ross, the director of Inventor Platforms at Intel, said.
Banerjee’s goal is simple. “My end goal would probably be having most of the blind people … using my Braille printer,” he said. And with him creating an affordable, accessible, incredibly creative printer that prints Braille, that’s not a bad goal to have. It’s no wonder that Banerjee’s become Silicon Valley’s youngest entrepreneur.
Photo: (Neil Banerjee)
