Nineteen-year-old Edward Aguilar left university after one year to bet on himself and Echo Labs.
With the goal of creating a new technology solution for those who are deaf and hard of hearing, Aguilar and his co-founder Sahan Reddy first considered a hardware product, a pair of augmented-reality glasses, that essentially subtitled the user's world.
After a month and a half, they pivoted to becoming a software company in order to help a larger group of people who might be constrained by the price of hardware.
Now Aguilar is 20, and his startup, Echo Labs, announced the highest pre-seed funding round — at $7.4 million — in Chicago startup history, according to CrunchBase data.
After going through TechStars Chicago, Aguilar found that many other founders were defeated with regard to fundraising in the current climate, but he thinks Echo Labs was able to attract investment because the company is building technology with immediate social beneficial impacts.
Building a solution for an industry that's currently too pricey, very limited and inaccessible, Aguilar said that Echo Labs is a completely new take on transcription services, which are regulated under the Americans with Disabilities Act and have been relatively stagnant for the last three decades. Universities, for example, are legally required to purchase human-level transcription for all of their content, he said.
What makes Echo Labs different
Aguilar's interest in the space started at a young age.
"I grew up with a few very close family members who were hearing impaired. I'd watch them go to a café or party or an event, and they couldn't really use any sort of technology. They had to communicate with sticky notes and handwritten notes because the tech wasn't good enough," he told Chicago Inno.
With Echo Labs, Aguilar wanted to build the first AI capable of human-level transcription that can actually understand what you're saying even in adverse conditions, such as high noise backgrounds with multiple speakers.
After going back and forth between San Francisco and Chicago, and working out of a "shoebox apartment" and "living only off ramen" for the last six months, Aguilar said he and Reddy moved into a 3,500-square-foot office in the Loop last month to help build out the business. The startup was at two people last week, expanded to six people this week and has a goal of reaching somewhere around 30 to 50 employees by the end of 2024.
The new funding also comes with an announcement about a new educational university pilot program the startup landed, where a group of universities will first be introduced to the technology.
"We're focusing on onboarding a select group of universities across the country to start trying this platform free of charge. These universities are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to do transcription or they have a massive amount of archived content that's not being shared with enough students because they cannot afford to make it accessible," Aguilar said.
