Braigo's Banerjee: A New Whizkid in the Silicon Valley At 13, Shubham Banerjee, is already a star in the Silicon Valley for launching his own company Braigo to create the first ever low cost machine to print Braille. The California-based Whizkid has garnered thesupport of Microsoft to offer a seamless experience for the visually-impaired to print documents for offline reading. "I discovered that typical Braille printers cost about $2,000 or more, and I felt that was unnecessarily expensive for someone already at a disadvantage," said Banerjee. This sparked a quest that spanned seven attempts which finally led to the development of a printer that was remarkably cheaper than its market rivals.

Braigo-christened with the combined names of Braille and Lego-was built by Banerjee when he was only 12 years old. Banerjee is officially also one of the youngest entrepreneurs to pick up venture capital funding. His effort to create Braigo was sparked by his curiosity on how a visually-impaired person reads. Online researchers revealed that embossers, Braille printers were shockingly expensive and unaffordable to those living in developing countries "My end goal would probably be having most of the blind peopleusing my Braille printer," he adds.

Braigo is upgraded to Braigo 2.0, and is said to be the first IoT-enabled, light weight and silent Braille printer that can print from a personal computer or any device. Following its success, Banerjee was invited by Microsoft to showcase his printer at a tech fair. The first successful iteration of Braigo cost $350 to build and its Do-It-Yourself instructions are available online.