Lego — Silicon Valley entrepreneur's building block to technical innovation

When not disrupting an industry, growing his company or pitching prospective clients, Shubham Banerjee can be found meeting his board, brainstorming with engineers or knocking on the doors of venture capitalists. Such is the life of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

He is 13 years old.

“Yes, I started young,” he said this week, as his father drove him from school, still in his navy blue uniform, to meet a potential investor. “But you see, I’ve been playing with Lego since I was two years old.”

Others may consider Lego a toy but Shubham, precocious even by Silicon Valley’s standards, considers it a tool for technological innovation.

The eighth-grader used Lego to create a low-cost Braille printer that he designed over long evenings at his family’s kitchen table in Santa Clara, an hour south of San Francisco. The idea is to print Braille reading materials from a personal computer or electronic device on to paper using raised dots instead of ink.

His startup, Braigo Labs, has received undisclosed seed capital from backers who think it could shake up the market for the visually impaired.

Shubham wants to develop a desktop printer that costs around $350, rather than the usual $2,000, and weighs just a few pounds rather than 20. He also hopes – though this remains science fiction for now – to develop refreshable digital Braille, so the blind can read tablets and laptops.

The founder and public face of Braigo Labs is too young to sign documents or write cheques so his mother is the official chief executive. His father, Niloy, originally from India, serves as the board.

Shubham devised the idea as a school science fair project last year, after he asked his parents how blind people read. “Google it,” they replied.

He said he was shocked to discover that a market of 200 million people, most in developing countries, relied on clunky, expensive equipment. “I decided to hack it,” he said.

He used a Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit robotics kit to build a prototype which won a county fair contest and generated local buzz. His father, himself an engineer and serial entrepreneur who works at Intel, invested $35,000 to get Braigo Labs off the ground last summer.

Shubham built a more sophisticated 2.0 version using an off-the-shelf desktop printer and Intel computer chip which can translate electronic text into Braille before printing.

Intel executives then invested an undisclosed sum for a share in the company, making the schoolboy one of the youngest entrepreneurs to receive venture capital. (Mark Zuckerberg was a relatively crusty 19-year-old when he launched an embyronic version of Facebook.)

“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, director of Inventor Platforms at Intel, told the Associated Press.

The Banerjees are using the money invested to pay about five outside engineers to work on the product.

Shubham hopes to launch the third version this summer, starting by sending about 25 models to blind institutions for feedback before scaling up production. Representatives from the Royal National Institute of Blind People are due to fly out from Britain to review the technology.

“Every other day after school we’re meeting investors,” Shubham said.

His father brimmed with optimism. “It’s a great product,” he said. “We’re focused on bringing this to market so real people can benefit.”

Shubham’s favourite subjects at school are maths and science. Classmates were “pretty chilled” about his entrepreneurial sideline, though some sensed opportunity, he said. “A few have asked if they can be part of my company.”

Shubham also debates, plays guitar and American football – he’s a quarterback. He said his heroes were his parents and business icons Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

But becoming a billionaire is not necessarily on the agenda. “I think I’d like to be an engineer or a surgeon,” he said.