Why Most Tech Founders Don't Build for the Margins
The majority of technology products are built for a specific kind of user — connected, educated, usually urban, usually abled. The assumptions baked into product design often mirror the life of the person building it. This is not malice. It is the natural result of building what you know.
Suket Amin, Co-Founder and CEO of Sunbots Innovations LLP, chose a different starting point. His work begins with those who are most likely to be overlooked by the mainstream technology industry — people living with visual disabilities, students who cannot access educational materials, individuals navigating a world that was not designed with them in mind.
From Idea to Impact: Building SMARTON
Suket is the creator of SMARTON — Sunbots Innovations' AI-powered smart glasses platform designed for visually impaired individuals. The product began not with a business plan, but with a genuine question: what would it take to help someone who is blind navigate their day with independence and dignity?
To answer that question properly, the team conducted on-the-ground research with over 100 blind and visually impaired people across India. They listened. They observed. They learned that the needs were not exotic — they were practical. Identify this currency note. Read this label. Tell me what is in front of me. These are not complex requests. But for someone without sight, they can define the boundaries of their independence.
SMARTON was built around those real, documented needs. Object recognition. Text reading in multiple languages. Currency detection. A voice assistant — MIRA — that routes requests intelligently without requiring the user to learn a new interface. An offline mode, because not everyone in India has reliable internet access. Every design decision traces back to what real users said they needed.
Recognition That Matters
The impact of Suket's work has been recognised at the highest levels of India's innovation ecosystem. Sunbots received awards from IIT Mandi and IIT BHU, two of India's most respected technical institutions. The company was awarded the Guardian Angel Award by VishalWin Foundation — an organisation working to uplift the special needs community — for its outstanding contribution to the sector.
Suket was selected as one of just 10 innovators across India for a prestigious recognition program, a reflection of the national significance of his work. SMARTON has been showcased at Tech4All 2025 — organised by the Government of India as a flagship exhibition of assistive technology — and at the International Purple Fest in Goa, one of the country's most important disability inclusion events.
At Vibrant Gujarat 2024, Sunbots represented the state's assistive technology ambitions, putting SMARTON in front of investors, government leaders, and global delegates.
The Global Stage
What began in Ahmedabad is increasingly catching attention internationally. Sunbots has taken the SMARTON platform to global forums, representing India's capacity to build world-class assistive technology from within the country. This matters for a sector that has long been dominated by expensive foreign products that rarely account for Indian languages, Indian pricing realities, or Indian infrastructure constraints.
Suket's philosophy is clear in the mission he has articulated: the goal is to create an affordable and accessible device that genuinely helps people navigate their world. Affordable matters. A brilliant device that costs more than a month's income for most users is not a solution. It is a showcase.
The Co-Founder Dynamic
Building a company like Sunbots requires multiple kinds of courage — the technical courage to build systems that have not been built before, and the human courage to stay committed to a mission that does not always have a clear commercial timeline. Suket brings the latter in abundance.
Working alongside Deep Parmar (CTO and co-founder), Suket focuses on the vision, the community, the partnerships, and the real-world deployment of SMARTON. Deep has described Suket as the driving force who sees the bigger picture and relentlessly pushes boundaries. Together, they form a founding team that is unusually well-matched — a technical builder and a purpose-driven leader who reinforces each other's strengths.
What Social Impact Innovation Actually Looks Like
Social impact innovation is a phrase that gets used loosely. Sometimes it means a feature in a product that makes a company look good. In Suket's case, it means something more literal: building technology where the primary measure of success is the degree to which a visually impaired person's life has genuinely improved.
That is not a soft metric. It is a demanding one. It requires continuous user research, iteration, willingness to rebuild when something does not work, and the patience to build trust with communities that have often been overpromised and under-delivered to by the technology industry.
Suket Amin and the Sunbots team are earning that trust — one pair of smart glasses, one visually impaired student, one accessible interaction at a time.
Learn more at suketamin.com and getsmartonai.com.