Three innovative tech entrepreneurs share their stories and discuss their startup companies that serve and assist people with disabilities.

Zuby Onwuta, CoFounder & CEO, ThinkAndZoom

Zuby Onwuta is a Tech Entrepreneur, Disability Advocate, Global Mentor and Global Speaker. Hardships from being visually impaired inspired him to invent “ThinkAndZoom”, a hands-free visual magnification solution, powered by brain waves, for low vision sufferers.

He is also the creator of “Kenti”, a hands-free iOS game developed for the study of “Sustained use of EEG in daily living” and winner of the 2015 Apple WWDC scholarship.

He spent 15 years in corporate America as a software engineer, working for companies like Alcatel-Lucent, Goldman Sachs & Co, and most recently IBM where he led global teams in resolving critical situation problems for clients like the White House, NASA, Boeing, Bloomberg and Bank of America to mention a few.

Thibault Duchemin, Founder & CEO, Ava

Thibault Duchemin is founder and CEO of Ava, a provider technology for empowering deaf/hard-of-hearing people in group conversations. Thibault was elected HLAA-CA trustee in March 2016. Engineer by training, Thibault has devoted recent years to creating radically innovative hearing loss accessibility solutions, founding the first speech recognition enabled group captioning system designed specifically to help people with hearing loss follow group conversations and business meetings.

Thibault was named one of Inc.’s 2015 Top 50 Emerging Global Impact Entrepreneurs to Watch. He has a Masters of Engineering degree from UC Berkeley and a Bachlers degree from École des ponts ParisTech in France. Thibault grew up the only hearing person in his family, helping his parents and sister get through the communication challenges associated with hearing loss and advocating, throughout his whole life, for his parents’ and sister’s rights in a society largely lacking of solutions to hearing loss problems. Thibault lives in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

Matthew Kleiman, Software Engineer, Pivotal Labs

Like his employer Pivotal Labs, Matt is passionate about transforming the way the world builds software. As an adult with ADD and other learning disabilities, Matt struggled to cope during his first 8 years in the tech industry. Pivotal’s core practices, such as Pair Programming and Test Driven Development, have revolutionized the way he works and have enabled him to be a successful member of each project team he joins.