They had just wrapped up an event at IIT Guwahati.
The kind of event that leaves everyone exhausted in the best way — ideas still buzzing, conversations half-finished, and that particular tiredness that only comes from being fully present somewhere for days. He was heading home. Bags packed, mind still running through everything that had happened, boarding the metro like any other traveller trying to get from one place to another.
What happened next wasn’t on his itinerary.
Somewhere on that metro ride, he noticed two people communicating in sign language. Hands moving quickly, faces expressive, a full conversation happening between them in a way that felt completely natural — because, for them, it was..
A police officer noticed too.
The police officer watched for a moment. And what he saw in their expressions wasn’t curiosity. It was suspicion. The movement of their hands, fast and unfamiliar to him, was mistaken for something it wasn’t. That police officer approached them. Stopped them.
A woman nearby stepped in. She looked at the officer and said, quietly but clearly — “This is their language.”
Three words. And they had to be said at all.
Our founder stood there and watched two people get stopped — not because they had done anything wrong, but because the world around them wasn’t built to understand them. The officer didn’t mean harm. But that’s almost the harder truth. The gap wasn’t about bad intent. It was about a system that had never made room for them in the first place.
Our hero didn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of the way home.
That evening, he started looking into it properly. Not for a course. Not for a competition. Just because he had to understand what that gap actually looked like at scale.
What he found wasn’t surprising, but it was sobering.
For someone with a speech or hearing impairment, navigating everyday life means running into invisible walls constantly. Hospitals. Government offices. Job interviews. Classrooms. Situations where communication is basic and non-negotiable — and yet, if sign language is how you speak, you are almost always dependent on someone else being present to translate for you.
No portable offline device existed that could bridge that gap in real time. Nothing that you could carry into a metro, a hospital, or a police station and use to be understood on your own terms. The most common solution was simply — bring someone who could translate.
That’s not independence. That’s a workaround that everyone had quietly agreed to accept.
The gap was real. And nobody had built anything to close it.
That’s where our founders' startup, Signify, began.
The early days were exactly what you’d expect from a first attempt at something genuinely new — slow, uncertain, and full of moments where everything stopped working at once.
Hardware failed at the worst times. Designs that looked right on paper performed poorly in the real world. Testing revealed problems that sent them back to the drawing board. They rebuilt. Refined. Kept returning to the people they were building for and asking harder questions each time.
As students with limited resources, there was no room to chase multiple directions at once. That constraint turned out to be useful. It forced focus. They stayed close to the core problem — communication, real-time, offline, independent — and didn’t drift from it.
Signify wasn’t built with abundant funding or a fully equipped lab. It was built in the hours between everything else, with the understanding that if they didn’t do this, it probably wasn’t going to get done.
Amrita TBI played a pivotal role in shaping Signify during its early stages. Through the GENESIS Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) program, the startup received a grant of ₹10 lakh, which helped accelerate product development. Beyond financial support, Amrita TBI also provided technical and business mentorship, guiding the founders in refining their technology, strengthening their business model, and navigating the challenges of building a hardware startup.
Accidentally, they entered a startup idea competition.
They won.
The prize money didn’t sit in an account. It went straight into registering Impacech Solutions Pvt. Ltd. and making Signify a real company with a real structure.
That step changes something. A startup stops being a project the moment it has a legal identity. It becomes something people can trust, verify, and engage with as a legitimate entity. Signify had crossed from an idea into an institution.
Recognition came gradually, then all at once.
National newspapers picked up the story. The coverage brought Signify in front of people who understood the problem from the inside — users, advocates, policymakers, and potential partners. People who had been waiting for something like this for a long time.
Then came the national award.
The team says this honestly: awards aren’t why they build. They build because the problem is real, and someone has to take it seriously. But a national-level award does something specific in how others perceive their work. It signals that what they’re doing has been evaluated and found meaningful. In spaces where trust is earned slowly, that matters.
Each piece of recognition — the press coverage, the award, the growing conversations — wasn’t a finish line. It was confirmation that the direction was right and the work needed to continue.
At its core, Signify exists because of the belief that communication should not require a translator, a helper, or a stranger’s intervention just to function in public.
The person on that metro had done nothing wrong. They were having a conversation. And yet the world around them wasn’t equipped to understand that — and someone had to explain it.
Signify is built so that explanation becomes unnecessary. So that someone can walk into a hospital, a school, a government office, or a metro station and be understood without depending on whoever happens to be standing nearby.
That’s the mission. It started on a metro ride home from IIT Guwahati, grew into a registered company, found its way into national headlines, and earned recognition at the national level.
The work continues.
If you’ve ever noticed a problem that felt too large and too entrenched to do anything about, they know that feeling.
But problems like this don’t wait for someone perfectly positioned to solve them. They get addressed by whoever is paying close enough attention to see them, and stubborn enough not to look away.
He was simply on a metro ride home when he couldn’t look away.
That’s how Signify, a hardware startup, was born.
And they’re only getting started.
"The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."