Lukas Simianer has been building an e-learning platform for people with visual impairments for a couple of years. Part of what drives him is his own personal experience.
He grew up in poverty with a single mom, living in Section 8 housing in Roanoke, Virginia. When he was 7, he was diagnosed with dyslexia. At the time, Simianer said dyslexia was treated as a form of retardation.
"So they threw me in a trailer back behind the school. And I had this horrible, horrible academic experience," he said. "I hated school and education. But I was very curious. But we didn't really have money, and so I just was a permanently curious person."
After being told he was stupid and retarded, all he wanted was to get away from school. He joined the Army, attended airborne school and graduated at age 17 as one of the youngest to become a jumper. A few years later, he was deployed to Afghanistan. By age 19, he had been wounded, got his Purple Heart and had to decide to work a desk job with the military or venture off on his own.
He picked the latter, and a whole new journey began.
He was a cable guy, a concrete man, he worked on the railroad and he got his bachelor's degree in nursing, only to learn later he didn't enjoy the work. He headed to South America as a government contractor to teach tactical medicine. But he still hadn't found his calling.
Then, while living in Nebraska, he Googled for how to find the best jobs that pay six figures without getting a traditional degree. And, at that time, he happened to meet a girl who was soon to move to Austin. When he arrived, he enrolled in a University of Texas coding camp.
He landed his first engineering job at local insurance software company ClutchAnalytics. While there, the seed for his startup was born. The company needed to update its website and systems to make them accessible and comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. He said the company was exploring consultants to do the work, but Simianer pitched the idea of having his stepdad, who had been blind since his 20s, work with him on making the company's products and site truly accessible.
It was that work, along with a cross-country road trip full of brainstorming, that planted the seeds for what would become Clusiv Inc. Founded in 2020 by Simianer, Clusiv is an e-learning platform for the blind and visually impaired. Simianer says it has very little competition.
Why?
"The truth is because it's really, really, really hard," he said. "You have to be able to talk to blind and vision-impaired people. And, while they're fully capable of talking, of course, it's not a capability issue ... you're talking about a community that has been perpetually treated like lepers throughout the breadth of world history, and even more so nowadays they're just left to wattle in poverty, and here you are trying to make money off of them. It doesn't come across all that well. So you have to really prove the mission intent and tell them where you're coming from with it. I don't think that without my key life experience or something very similar you could really empathize enough to do it."
In the beginning, Simianer bootstrapped the startup with his own income from his previous endeavors and took out personal loans. He has since won several pitch competitions that come with prize money, including the 2021 Austin Young Chamber's Austin Fast Start in June and the grand prize at Bob Evans Farms Heroes to CEOs.
Fundraising has been difficult, but he said he has promising opportunities for the future. He said the company has secured about $300,000 of the $500,000 he plans to raise.
It's a small start for fixing a big problem. Simianer said blind and visually impaired people have a 92% underemployment rate and an average salary of about $27,000.
Clusiv has found traction with the Florida Division of Blind Services. Students who completed Clusiv courses in a pilot project all landed jobs and, on average, more than doubled their salaries.
Clusiv plans to launch the scalable version of its platform in the early months of 2022, with hopes of finding traction in all 50 states.
Simianer said his best advice for fellow founders struggling to raise money and get traction is to learn that it's a game of signals.
"You can have the greatest idea in the world and the ability to execute on it, but until you have the signals and the proven pattern of doing extraordinary things, no one's really going to listen," he said. "Surround yourself with good people."
