Every day, millions of people are excluded from conversations because they cannot hear what others say well. Our CEO Thibault grew up in a Deaf family & witnessed firsthand how the world was not accessible for them. Together with our CTO Skinner — deaf since age 2 — Thibault co-founded Ava to make live captioning of conversations as easy as turning on captions on TV.
Mission • Positions • Life • Impact
We want to radically improve how we humans communicate with each other. Our first step at Ava is to empower 466M deaf and hard-of-hearing people to live in a fully accessible world.
Our small but fast-growing team has reinvented AI-based speech recognition technology to be in service of people who need it the most. We dream of a 24/7 accessible world, without any communication barrier. In this pursuit, we're seeing how critical communication skills are, yet very far from ideal, to unleash our collective potential. This is for us the ultimate barrier we need to lift.
Our belief is that well-designed technology can help everyone communicate and connect better — much more effectively & authentically — so humanity can achieve the greatest things together.
Origins of Ava • Video (#1 shared on ProductHunt) • How we changed a life (and many more)
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<aside> 🤝 Ava is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We celebrate, support and thrive on diversity, and that's why we're committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. If you're deaf or hard-of-hearing especially, we encourage you to let us know, as we're committed to be the most accessible workplace you've ever worked at.
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We're a small team spread between two cities (San Francisco, where our Product & Growth teams are, and Paris — where our AI team is). We care about making the world a much more connected place, and we believe it's best done by a highly-creative and driven group of humans working in concert to change the current status quo. We value potential as much as experience and empathy as much as authenticity. Our culture is always evolving, and we believe new people can and should change how we operate and what we value. A few recurring themes:
We firmly believe a small team can make an impact on millions, and we'll stand together to help each other reach this goal.
In our early days office, we had handcrafted this awesome Mojo Tree, to pin the many positive messages from our users. Today we still continue this tradition through our Mojo channel in Slack.
Shooting our video in Los Angeles before our viral launch - it was the most shared video ever on ProductHunt, and still is. A pretty amazing day!
We love going to First Fridays in Oakland. Here we are BBQing on the rooftop of our first office there.
Founders Thibault, Pieter & Skinner met in UC Berkeley, where we still like to hike. Go Bears!
One of our weekly Ava workshops, during which we get to meet our users. Staying in touch with our community is important for us, since it helps us realize the impact of the work we do every day.
One of our many ampersands, our logo. It reminds us that 1 & 1 = 3, that great teams achieve more than what they thought was possible.
Backstage at a Broadway show during a NY trip, with none other than Marlee Matlin, one of the most famous Deaf people in the US.
We love learning, but also love teaching in all of its forms. Here's Thibault giving a sign language class — his first language — in an evening class.
Guillaume packed his favorite drone to our retreat, and JB directed this aerial master shot.
We can be quite competitive in games & sports. The Paris team even made a point to train new hires to acquire fussball skills!
Wakeboarding in the summer during our first week-long retreat in Tahoe. One of the perks of being in California where we love to spend time in nature.
Yosemite trip with some of the Ava team members
