Seeingrobot

Core Team

Rida Bourji – Founder & CEO
Salvatore Raddino – Co-Founder & CTO
Clara Lagromarsini – Co-Founder & Chief R&D
Matthieu Osipici – Co-Founder & Head of AI
Hamza el Mansouri – Cofounder & COO

About

Seeingrobot addresses a problem that impacts more than 250 million people around the world: autonomy in mobility for both partially and completely visually impaired people. MiMi, its first innovation, is an assistive technology that aims to bring back autonomy for VI's in their day-to-day mobility. It integrates several cutting-edge technologies, such as robotics and deep learning, to solve four principal challenges: a) going to unknown places while having a sense of the surrounding environment; b) detecting and avoiding obstacles; c) detecting and recognizing guiding signs; and d) moving in full security and comfort.

What is the main goal of your startup? What do you hope to achieve in France and/or the rest of the world?

Seeingrobot's main goal is to improve mobility and transport through the use of technology. In France, we hope to develop our first autonomous assistive technology for blind people ASAP in order to give access to more than 1.7M people. In the future, our goal is to roll it out to North America, Europe and APAC, and then to the rest of the world. We see potential spin-offs from our concept and are looking towards tomorrow very optmistically.

Where did you get the inspiration for your idea?

Rida, the Founder and CEO of Seeingrobot, comes from a family where his two grandparents lost their vision with age. He witnessed how they suffered in their day-to-day life, especially in mobility and always wanted to find a solution for them. Today with the reduced costs of components and sensors, and the rise of cloud computing, big data and AI, autonomous vehicles and drones became a reality. The question is, why not learn from these advancement and bring them to the handicap world, and help them get included in the society again and change their life?

What is your proudest startup accomplishment to date?

The positive emotions and optimistic feelings that we have created in our early testing users, the way they have interacted with our innovation, and the way they have spread the word super fast in their communities were definitely our proudest accomplishments to date.

What are the biggest challenges you anticipate in the future?

1) Develop performant algorithms: Our technology requires very fast and accurate decision making in order to provide a safe assistance experience when planning trajectories, thus requiring high computing power and energy. In contrast, our device must be light in weight and handy in order to be adopted by blind people.

2) Embedded navigation systems must predict the movement of surrounding moving objects to anticipate its next move and update trajectories and path plan real time.

3) Data Collection: There are not many datasets currently that classify objects on sideways, sideways, metro stations, airports, building entrances, etc.

What do you plan to do next?

Develop the first MVP with basic functionalities of planning a trip through voice assistance; avoid obstacles whether static or moving; and come back to track and update trajectory.

How has MIT GSW helped you in advancing in your goals?

It provided us with more exposure and a label of recognition for the potential of our idea.