Eric Ju Yoon Kim, a South Korean national and a University of Washington graduate is the founder of Dot – a company making an active Braille smartwatch meant for blind people.
Kim's first encounter with the barriers blind people face came when someone showed him a braille Bible as a university student in the U.S. He returned to his native South Korea and founded Dot to make affordable tactile devices for the visually impaired and deaf-blind. Its product line features the Dot Watch, a braille smartwatch; the Dot Mini, a low-cost education device for developing countries; and the Dot Pad, a "braille Kindle" graphic tablet. While its award-winning watch had 140,000 pre-orders from 13 countries, the startup's bigger goals are to bring its education devices to Kenya and expand to India.