While the majority of us were doing our best to graduate from high school and enroll into college, 18-year-old Polish entrepreneur Mateusz Mach had just announced that his app “Five” has raised around $150,000 in funding. Initially designed to be humorous he didn’t expect to see deaf users contact him and thank him for making an app that made it easier for them to communicate.
“Five” is designed around the simple concept of sending hand signs to other users; hand signs like the peace sign or punk sign, amongst other various hand gestures. When it hit app stores in 2015, Mach expected to be used by people on their Apple Watches as an easy way of communication. Little did he know that he had also built a platform that let deaf users communicate to each other in American Sign Language (ASL). For something like 80% of the deaf community, Mach says, typing isn’t a natural mode of communication, since they lack any kind of internal “voice.”
Mach promptly started seeking media interest by winning competitions to garner enough recognition to sit down with potential investors, something that can be quite difficult if you’re still in high school, not to mention that it is significantly more difficult to get cash in Poland than Silicon Valley due to the fact that venture capitalists are often tied up with nationalized funds from the European Union.
As a result Mach had to start doing a serious amount of research, immersing himself in term sheets, fiscal calculations and other mumbo jumbo that can often be the death of young entrepreneurs who just want to see their dreams realised. Luckily for him, it paid off.
He has found a new co-founder in investor and designer Piotr Polański and now Mach intends to hire ASL experts to help build out Five’s features; he has already secured a partnership with the UN which includes the employment of a New York-based ASL interpreter.
Mach will be graduating from his IB high school in spring and plans to enrol as an economics major in the Abu Dhabi campus of the New York university.
You can download Five on the Apple App store here and the Google Play Store here.
Source: Business Insider
