Venture Capitalists Have Anointed a 13-Year-Old Teen
No one is quite sure if 13-year-old Shubham Banerjee is the youngest human being to ever be blessed with venture capital funding. The only thing that's certain is that you have the same number of hours in a day as Banerjee and you should feel ashamed of yourself.
His startup, Braigo Labs, makes low-cost Braille printers and everybody else look bad:
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.
[...] 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.
News of the deal came as part of an announcement from Intel Capital that the firm had invested $62 million in 16 startups. Braigo's cut was "a few hundred thousand dollars." Until now, Banerjee's only backing was $35,000 from his mom, the president of the company who had to co-sign his funding documents, and his dad, whose education startup was bought by Intel last year. The Silicon Valley Business Journal says Intel did not go into details about how the rest of that $62 million was divvied up:
Intel didn't break down how much each of its new investments amounted to, nor how much each company is raising in the round it participated in.
Look at that, Palo Alto's newest protégé just learned the first rule of startups: tout the funding and the rest will follow.
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