[100 Emerging Women Leaders] This tech founder’s assistive device is helping make learning easier for the visually impaired

One of Akshita Sachdeva’s earliest forays into the intersection of healthcare and technology was during a project in her computer science engineering course, when her mentor introduced her to a team working on a project for the visually impaired.

In her third year at Manav Rachna College of Engineering, Faridabad, she built a hand glove that sported a camera on the index finger that could read when pointed at written words. It also had obstacle detection sensors on the fist to give a haptic, vibratory feedback to help the blind person navigate.

Growing up, Sachdeva wanted to become a doctor after she lost her grandmother to cancer.

A chance conversation with her zoology professor while she was in the 12th grade changed the course of her journey. 

“I spoke to him about my passion to work in healthcare. He told me that it was not always about being a good doctor, but working at the intersection of how technology can help diagnose cancer at an early stage so that it can be cured. It was an eye-opening moment,” she tells HerStory.

A few years later, this conversation led to the college project and in 2017, led her to start Trestle Labs and its innovative solution Kibo, which  can listen, translate, digitise, and “audiotize’ printed, handwritten and digital content across 60 languages.

The journey to building assistive tech

The hand glove Sachdeva built in college was introduced to the National Association for the Blind (NAB) in New Delhi for trials.

“A young boy used it and was super excited to read the newspaper for the first time. We also put some chairs in his way and he was able to navigate using the glove,” she recalls.

After this success and seeing the excited look on the child’s face, there was no turning back. Sachdeva declined all college placements in leading IT companies and decided to take this innovation forward, and build tech that could make education, livelihood and daily living more accessible for the blind.

She struggled finding incubation centres to support her and chanced upon the Digital Impact Square in Nashik, run by the TCS Foundation, which would cherry pick 40-50 motivated individuals every year and group them to solve challenges using technology, eventually leading to social entrepreneurship by the end of a 12 to 18-month window. 

Here, she met her co-founder, and later spouse, Bonny Dave, a mechanical engineer from Nirma University. While in his second year, Dave had volunteered at the Blind People’s Foundation in Ahmedabad. 

“Bonny was looking at a solution for blind students carrying heavy Braille books and built a single-cell refreshable Braille display for them. We found common synergies,” she says.

It took some unlearning for both of them to look at real-time solutions for problems. They spent the first six months as a group of five meeting 150 visually impaired people, from grade learners, bankers, PhD scholars to homemakers.

During this time, they met Dipali Pawar, a 17-year-old student who had lost her vision suddenly. She had just completed a semester at college. The institution refused to take her back and asked her to learn Braille instead.

“She spent two years learning Braille; it was difficult for her and finally, when she tried getting back to her education, they wouldn’t take her in. Her only option was to enroll into the Yashwant Rai Chavan Maharashtra Open University,” Sachdeva reveals.

Sachdeva and Dave met her at the National Federation of the Blind in Nashik and learned that she was planning to approach an NGO to have books audio-recorded, which would take four to six weeks for a single book. She would only have books for three subjects before her exams. 

They took her books back to their office, digitised and converted the text into speech, and presented it to her in the form of a mobile application. 

After three months, they received a call from Dipali, who excitedly told them that she had completed all her second-year exams in a single attempt and was applying for admission to the third year.

Inclusive learning for the visually impaired

In November 2017, Sachdeva and Dave registered Trestle Labs, having built the MVP of their product, which they called Kibo—an acronym for Knowledge-In-a-Box.

“We took it to the National Association for the Blind in Nashik where we were shown a huge imported machine, lying unused. It could read printed English documents but could not read other languages or notes that students are generally used to sharing with each other. This led us to the realisation that we had to solve the problem of numerous Indian languages and also look at handwriting,” she explains.

On January 4, 2018, on Louis Braille Day, they launched the device that could read in Hindi and Marathi in addition to English.

After the pilot, they started getting inbound orders from institutions like the Nashik Municipal Corporation and IIM-Ahmedabad—this was the first time in India an assistive tech tool was focused on Indian language support.

The first model was priced at around Rs 40,000 and developed by the engineers at Trestle Labs. 

In the next six years, the device evolved to its present iteration that supports 60 global languages and includes 13 Indian languages—English, Hindi, Sanskrit, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati and Assamese to other African and Asian languages. 

The device comes in the shape of a water bottle and when a button on its left is pressed turns into a table lamp shape. A USB cable connects it to a laptop. All one has to do is to open the home page, kibo.trestlelabs.com and the device captures the text of the book kept on it. You can either listen to it in the language written or ask for a translation in any of the 100 languages available.

The Kibo Suite has four products. The two products for individuals include a mobile application that can be downloaded from the App Store or PlayStore as a learning tool, and a web software for working professionals. Kibo XS can be used in public school libraries and colleges, and Kibo 360 is for enterprises, universities and publishing houses where large-scale application is required.

Moving up and onwards 

Trestle Labs is a bootstrapped venture, and closed at a net profit of 33% this year.

The Nidhi Prayas grant from the Department of Science and Technology in 2018 helped Trestle Labs build its first inventory. Since then, many grants have aided Kibo’s development. 

Currently, they have over 650 B2B clients, and Kibo is available at the Indian Parliament library, all IITs, IIMs, Central State Universities, private colleges and universities. 

To date, Kibo has over 1,80,000 visually impaired users, using the technology through their institutions. The Kibo XS kit is available for educational institutions at Rs 99,000 with a lifetime licence, while visually impaired individuals whose income is less than 5 lakh can get a lifetime licence for Rs 27,000. They can even opt for a one-year licence for Rs 10,000 and from the second year onwards they can opt for recharge plans starting at Rs 500 for 500 pages.

Kibo also featured on Shark Tank India Season 3, where it raised Rs 60 lakh for 6% equity. Sachdeva was also among three Indian women who were awarded the 2024 Cartier Women’s Initiative Fellowship.

“We are looking at two ways of scaling up – geographic scale where we are actively partnering with distributors across different countries, especially in Asian and African markets,” Sachdeva says. 

“As we scale deeper, we are looking at adding more languages and adding generative AI to offer independent self-learning and self-training modules like an AI companion and make life more inclusive for the blind.”