Ava announces $10M Series A fundraising. What does this mean for the future of accessibility?
Learn More

We are Ava and we believe total accessibility is possible.

We're a small team from around the world and we're breaking down communication barriers between the deaf & hearing worlds.
See open positions
Thibault Duchemin speaking at a TedTalk
The origins of Ava

Examining the unexpected depths of his frustration led Thibault Ducheminto realize that the communication barriers he’d seen growing up could be broken.

Watch TED talk now ->
An Ava user in a family setting
Introducing Ava: 24/7 accessible conversations with deaf & hard-of-hearing people.

Ava captions the conversations for you when lip-reading is too hard for you to follow.

Watch video now ->
An Ava user and promoter
How we changed a life (and many more)

Several months ago, I found out about something that would change my life. It was something I had only imagined.and suddenly, it wasn’t only a hope,wishful thinking,or a fantasy -it was becoming a reality!

Read now ->
Illustration representing the communication between deaf and hearing worlds via Ava
Our Manifesto For Total Accessibility

Every single day, we deny 360M deaf and hard-of-hearing people full access to our social & professional lives. What needs to happen to fix that?

Read now ->
“I gained a level of confidence that I could not have imagined before. Suddenly meetings I used to avoid are now accessible. You can’t possibly imagine the impact it has made for me.”
Frederique Seneque, Long-time Ava User

Our mission

We want to radically improve how we humans communicate with each other. Our core mission at Ava is to empower 466M deaf and hard-of-hearing people to live in a fully accessible world.
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.

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.

Our values

Unity
It doesn't matter where you're from. Together, we're stronger. It's you & us now.
Singularity
Ava users are Pioneers. Every day they explore the limits of what's possible in accessibility with us. We are the same. We set an ambitious goal, total accessibility, and to reach it, we need to go where no-one has gone before.
Authenticity
In sign language, communication is direct and respectful. It is authentic. We believe in a culture where everyone speaks their mind, improving accessibility.
Beyond
We think our product, our business, our company with empathy. We ought to go beyond surface-level interactions, to go beyond barriers.
Features icon
Impact
We get up every morning because we know that our work with technology can have a real impact on millions of lives and fundamentally help to build a better society.

Our team

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:

Amazing people have joined us in our mission to challenge the status quo in accessibility, mobile and speech technologies. Here's who's behind Ava.
Thibault Duchemin
CEO & Co-Founder
Pieter Doevendans
COO & Co-Founder
Skinner Cheng
CTO & Co-Founder
Sacha Bécourt
Lead iOS Engineer
Marc Frochtzweig
VP Marketing
Jean-Benoit Malzac
Head of Product
Adrien Doumergue
Deep Learning Scientist
Mehdi Chablaoui
Communication & Business Operations Manager - Europe
Daan Wynen
AI Lead
Antoine Remy
Sales Lead - Europe
Kirsten Fargas
Product Marketing Manager
Bonnie Pieterse
Accessibility Trailblazer
Juan Pablo Ospina
Data Engineer
Sylvain Conso
Data Engineer
Louise Noell
Scribe Lead - Europe
Julien Dubois
Scribe Ops - Europe
Marie Rousseau Brachhammer
Scribe
Emilie Arifon
Customer Success - Europe
Akhil Viz
Customer Success
Khaled Zaouk
ML Scientist
Marie-Christine Tan
Partnerships & Main Accounts Manager - Europe
Emmanuel Ikechukwu Umunnakwe
Product Designer
Ilya Vlasov
QA Engineer
Alexis Deforges
Marketing Director - Europe
Guillaume Carbajal
ML Scientist
Alexey Ozerov
Senior Speech Scientist
Allen Sarmiento
Full Stack Web Developer
Baptiste Bourgeaux
Machine Learning Intern
Juan Coria
AI Visiting Researcher
Anthony Franklin
Head of US Sales
Dan Lagstein
Growth Marketing Manager
Chaimae Hadrouch
Machine Learning Intern
Bertrand Higy
ML Scientist
Thomas d’Hérouville
Key Account Executive

Want to join our journey?

Today, Ava is used by hundreds of thousands of deaf, hearing & hard-of-hearing people around the world who have come to rely on it for their daily conversations, meetings at work or hangouts with their friends. We've helped small and large organizations alike easily become accessible to their members, from startups to Fortune 500 companies like Disney or Airbus, world-class universities or even some of the largest events in the world like Dreamforce.

We're growing quickly and have found product-market fit, but we're still at the very beginning of this journey. Interpersonal communication is a fascinating and immense space, largely untapped by technology. Yet we see a clear path to enable a world where billions of people communicate better with each other and connect at a deeper level. We are already lucky to work with some of the best investors & advisors in the world to make this huge ambition possible.
See our open positions ->

Our partners

We are supported by organizations and non-profits who help advocate for Deaf & hard-of-hearing people needs daily. We're proud to count them part of our supporters.
‍
FedEx logo
USPS logo