Annie, Thinkerbell Labs Private Limited

The first contours of Annie's design took shape in the 2010s at the Goa campus of the Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, when Dawle and co-founders Aman Srivastava, Dilip Ramesh, and Saif Shaikh built a Braille alphabet song box on a Raspberry Pi. They received overwhelmingly positive feedback and enthusiasm from visually impaired students and their teachers alike. Sanskriti Dawle (CEO) is the public face and mission leader of Thinkerbell Labs. The name "Annie" pays tribute to Anne Sullivan, the dedicated teacher of Helen Keller, symbolising empowerment through education. Aman Srivastava handles product strategy; Dilip Ramesh leads technology and hardware engineering as CTO; Saif Shaikh manages operations. The four-person founding team brings complementary engineering disciplines — hardware, software, manufacturing, and business — that a complex hardware-software integrated product like Annie requires.

Annie is the world's first self-learning Braille literacy device — a hardware-software integrated educational tool that enables visually impaired children to learn to read, write, and type in Braille independently, without requiring constant one-on-one supervision from a trained Braille teacher, in their mother tongue. Annie is the world's first Braille literacy device that helps visually impaired people learn to read, write, and type in Braille on their own in any medium of instruction. The content on Annie is available in 14 localised languages. Autodesk This multilingual design — covering English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, and regional Indian languages alongside Arabic — made Annie deployable not just across India but across the Middle East and South Asia.