Who are we?
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biped is a startup, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, that develops a smart navigation harness for blind and visually impaired people. At the time we're writing these lines, biped has 6 employees, and was co-founded by Mael and Bruno:
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How it started
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This whole adventure started back in summer 2020. Mael lived close by the ophthalmic hospital in Lausanne, and was doing a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence at this time. On one side, Mael saw the rapid development of autonomous driving capabilities. On the other, he still helped some blind users cross the street near his apartment. The link between these two fields became obvious.“Autonomous driving technology car control cars on the highway at a very high speed. We should be able to guide blind users using this same technology, but at the pedestrian level.”.

‍Mael met Bruno at a Hackathon, the International Create Challenge, in Switzerland. They were both driven by the will to have an impact on people's lives. In less than a year, the idea became of growing startup, with 5 collaborators, 250+ beta-testers, 6 prototypes and 10+ key partners including the Ophthalmic hospital Jules Gonin in Lausanne

The vision

We're trying, while building biped, to apply new technologies where we think they can make the biggest impact. Our vision with biped is to build a life-changing innovation, that could let users discover new places entirely on their own, safely and independently. biped will remain extremely simple to use, become smaller over time, and do always more. It will be able to read text, recognize faces, detect specific crosswalks, provide indoor navigations in specific buildings, and even help you run or ice-skating in the long term. That's the future we envision.