Azima Dhanjee
There are 70M Deaf individuals globally and 5M in Pakistan alone; over 80% cannot read and rely on sign language as their primary mode of communication. Pakistan would need 13,000 interpreters to serve its Deaf population, and interpretation is needed everywhere: health, finance, education, employment.
BIG IDEA
AI-driven sign-language interpretation via phone
Watch the pitch
The mission
Enable Deaf people to live independently.
How it works
A Deaf user downloads the ConnectHear app with SILA, its sign-language AI agent. A hearing person speaks or types and SILA converts it into sign language; the Deaf user signs and SILA converts it into text and audio. Professionally trained Deaf interpreters and native signers label, validate and continuously expand the signing dataset SILA is trained on.
The dream
Sign language as the third language of the internet. Doer at scale: other businesses. Payer at scale: customers, individuals and government.
Potential for impact at scale
Read against four questions, in the context of the organisation’s stage: is the impact good enough, is the problem big enough, is the model simple enough to deliver at scale, and is it cheap enough for whoever pays at scale.
Good enough · impact and evidence
50,000 registered users, 3,000 calls a month, and 200 Deaf people employed through the platform. The impact metric they hold themselves to is independence: the share of Deaf users still active at three months who report feeling more independent.
Big enough · addressable market
5M Deaf people in Pakistan and 70M worldwide, with interpretation needed across health, finance, education and employment.
Simple enough · to deliver at big scale
The app is the delivery vehicle; the hard, defensible part, a 250,000+ word Indo-Pak Sign Language dataset, is already built and compounds with use. Real-time sign-to-text remains the technical frontier.
Cheap enough · for payers at scale
About $3 per user per month today at 3,000 users (human interpretation, B2B-subsidized); target of $0.03 per user per month at 750,000+ users once SILA's AI interpretation scales.
So far
- 50,000 registered users and 3,000 monthly calls (end 2025)
- 200 Deaf people employed through the platform
- 250,000+ word Indo-Pak Sign Language database, plus an AI content tool for disaster notifications