[100 Emerging Women Leaders] This woman entrepreneur has developed AI-powered gloves to help the deaf find a voice

When Aishwarya Karnataki was in class 8, her school had a special section for teaching children with disabilities. As part of the student council, she used to interact with these children every week.

During these interactions, she noticed that children with cerebral palsy, autism, and locomotive disorders could talk to each other. But Atharva, a deaf child, could not speak to anyone.

“Nobody understood sign language, so he always played alone. So, I started learning sign language to interact with him,” Karnataki tells HerStory.

Since then, Karnataki wanted to do something for the deaf community.

But her desire came true, 12 years and two startups later, with Glovatrix. Founded by Karnataki and Parikshit Sohoni in 2020, Glovatrix is a Pune-based startup that has developed gloves that use artificial intelligence to translate sign language into voice.

“We aim to empower the deaf and speech impaired people as we want them to be able to express themselves,” she adds.

Following the calling

Karnataki always wanted to venture into entrepreneurship. She says that during college she used to run a small business like selling donuts.

“I knew that I was not made for 9 to 5 and wanted to do something of my own,” she adds.

After completing her engineering, she translated her vision into a reality by starting a quality assurance company, MACJ, with her father. The company was into quality checks for real estate buildings.

In 2018, she also won the bid to start and operate a testing center for a Luxembourg-based company that was into manufacturing seat sensors. However, the venture faced challenges, leading to the closure of the company and the centre in the same year.

Although Karnataki always wanted to do something for the deaf community, she had no specific idea in her mind.

A year later, in 2020, while preparing for MBA, she met Sohoni at a party. Having the same desire to work for the deaf community, they discussed the idea of starting up together.

“I was not sure about starting Glovatrix, but then COVID happened and I could not go abroad to pursue my MBA. So, I invested my time into the startup,” she says.

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Tech for good

Talking about the technology, Karnataki explains that while pursuing electrical engineering, she worked on a gesture-controlled robotic car instead of remote controls. She says that this project played a crucial role in her startup as well.

At Glovatrix, they developed FifthSense, an AI-based glove-like device with sensors that map hand and finger movements in 3D space.

Explaining how it works, she says that the right pointer finger has a button which needs to be pressed when the person makes gestures. These are run by the algorithms that predict and translate them into text. This is then converted into voice by the speaker.

Similarly, it also comes with a microphone which captures spoken words and converts them into text and images for the deaf user.

“We have achieved 98% accuracy based on 100 gestures. This will keep on increasing as we keep adding more gestures,” she adds.

The startup has made its eighth hardware iteration and second app iteration. It plans to position itself as a workplace communication tool and go for the B2B market. The product is currently priced at Rs 20,000 and plans to launch the product commercially in six months.

“After sometime, we will introduce this product in the B2C market as well. We decided to start with the B2B market because of the pricing of the product, which will eventually come down as we reach the economies of scale,” Karanataki adds.

The startup has raised funds from the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme, Nidhi Prayas, a Birac Big grant. It has also won the “Best women led assistive technology startup” award.

“We have raised Rs 1 crore in equity free grants and price money so far,” says Karnataki.

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Challenges as a woman entrepreneur

Karnataki’s journey as an entrepreneur has not without challenges.

She says that the real estate sector is heavily male-dominated, and she used to wear sari and bindi on purpose to be taken seriously at work.

Karnataki recalls an instance where a male civil engineer used to show discomfort in taking orders from her owing to his greater experience in the field.

Similarly, she reminisces another instance where she met a builder to do a sales call and he said, “Tumhari umar kitni hai utna mera tajurba hai. Tum meri galti nikalogi,” (Your age is as much as my experience. You'll find my fault).

“From all this I learnt that it is only by outworking everyone one can get respect,” she adds.

Talking about her experience with Glovatrix, she adds that she did not face many challenges this time. She believes that though there are very few women in the social development sector, there are a plethora of opportunities and schemes these days that boost women entrepreneurship.

Acknowledging the evolving tech landscape, Karnataki advises women entrepreneurs and says, “Embrace technology, you cannot escape it. Keep updating yourself and never give up. Trust the process you will get there.”