Our story
Built in Nairobi. For the world.
ZySignAI was conceived in 2018 by Simon Karuga, a developer from Thika, Kenya, who watched his deaf relative excluded from the media and conversations that everyone else took for granted.
He attempted to build it as his university final year project in 2023 — before the AI tools needed to make it work properly even existed. His supervisors told him it was impossible. He built it anyway.
In March 2026, working alone in Nairobi with Django, Next.js, and Whisper AI, he deployed the first working prototype. ZySignAI is now live, open source, and being developed as communication infrastructure for the 70 million deaf people worldwide who deserve full access to the world's information.