If Shubham Banerjee cannot lay claim to being the world’s youngest venture capital-backed entrepreneur, he comes very close.
Banerjee was 12 years old when he closed an early-stage funding round with Intel Capital, the company’s venture capital arm, last month for his prototype for a low-cost Braille printer. The San Jose, California, middle-schooler has since turned 13.
That’s young, even by the standards of Silicon Valley, where many venture capitalists unapologetically prefer to fund youth over experience.
Young entrepreneurs are usually in their mid-teens when they hit it big. Nick D’Aloisio, founder of online news aggregator Summly, was 17 when Yahoo bought his company last year for $30 million.
Brothers John and Patrick Collison, behind payments service Stripe, were 16 and 19 when they sold an earlier business to a Canadian company for $5 million.
After reading a fundraising flyer about the blind, Banerjee felt inspired to turn a high-tech version of Legos, the toy building blocks, into a device that could print in Braille. One day, he wants to mass-produce the printers and sell them for about $350, far less than Braille printers cost now… Read More
Source: Yahoo News