Rishab Nayak

Rishab started coding with a desire to help people. At his first tech event in middle school, he and his team created an ASL textualization tool. Programming opened new doors and new opportunities for social good, but he says, “Even though I loved computer science, I always thought of it as my passion and not something I wanted to study.” At 17, when Rishab convinced his parents to let him travel across the world from his home in Bangalore, India to study at Boston University, he chose to enroll as a biology major.

That changed in Rishab’s freshman year when he attended BostonHacks 2017 and was inspired by the upperclassmen around him, who hacked prototypes faster than he could come up with ideas. Motivated to learn everything he could about computers and become an expert hacker himself, Rishab competed in and submitted winning projects at HackNYU, HackHarvard, and WHACK 2018 over the following year. By the time Rishab was a sophomore, he had declared as a double major in Chemistry and CS and was a member of the team organizing BostonHacks.

Rishab is a skilled hackathon participant, but he doesn’t stop there. He takes prototypes developed at hackathons and turns them into something more impactful. While attending PerkinsHacks, a hackathon organized by the Perkins School For The Blind geared towards solving real-world problems, Rishab saw the potential to help people with impaired vision navigate their surroundings. He was motivated to help people like his grandparents, who struggled with sight and mobility.

In collaboration with friends, he refined his idea at HackHarvard. They won Best Use of Google Cloud for their project Stepify, a piece of wearable hardware that could give audio feedback about a user’s surroundings. Their project was noticed by Google for Education, and their team was put in contact with a group in Brazil to develop their idea as an app.

Over the course of a year, Rishab and his friends collaborated to develop Eyespace, an accessibility tool for the visually impaired created through machine learning with Google Cloud and Google’s Flutter toolkit. Eyespace users can communicate with a chatbot through voice or text input and receive spoken information describing their environment, including any obstacles in their path.

Beyond just building Eyespace, Rishab also worked to make the software it used better. He obtained early access to the Flutter framework and made significant contributions to its source code.

Rishab has stayed deeply involved in the hacker community, mentoring at a number of hackathons. While mentoring at TechTogether, a series of hackathons by Major League Hacking aimed at combating gender inequality in tech, Rishab worked with a team creating smart locks for micromobility vehicles like electric bicycles and scooters. As the project progressed, Rishab transitioned from a mentorship role to a co-working role. That original project eventually grew into the company Rishab co-founded: Mount. To date, Mount has employed a team of 12, raised over $4M in seed funding, and been recognized by PhocusWire and the Colorado Cleantech Industries Association. Rishab continues to stay passionate about creating value for others, and hopes to inspire other first-generation students and international students to follow their dreams and find success.