Earlier this year, Lennart van der Ziel, Brend Kouwenhoven and Nick Yap founded The Product Garage to jumpstart meaningful hardware companies. They first decided to prove their concept; that with the right tools, ideas can transform into companies at speed.

Travis was born
In their daily and professional lives, the three of them had all experienced language barriers and took this problem to create a solution. Travis the Translator was then founded, an innovation that combines hardware and software to help create understanding between people from all walks of life. From a simple idea in January 2017, Travis counts for over $1.6M in crowdfunding and over 50,000 devices sold to date. Each of the founders led teams passionately – Lennart driving campaigns and community, Nick developing the product and updates and Brend establishing standards and building the company.

Next step for Travis
Following this success, Travis reviewed their initial plan to jumpstart ventures along with a review of their own individual roles. From 11th December, Brend becomes the CEO of Travis to grow the company into the next phase with Nick and Lennart in non-executive board positions. “Travis took off in 2017. I feel the responsibility to give more people the opportunity to be understood by broadening our product-line and constantly improving our technology.” said Brend, CEO of Travis.

The Product Garage
Lennart will use his experience in bringing purposeful companies from ideas to a reality and amplifying their growth as CEO of The Product Garage. Lennart mentioned “It’s the perfect opportunity now to pass our learnings onto other teams and help them get started at speed and with support in their crowdfunding campaigns”. The Product Garage will select the right teams by matching creators and entrepreneurs and help them with launching their first products successfully.

Travis Foundation
Through Travis, the founders also realised that with over 7,000 languages in our world, only around 120 are digitised and available for translation technology. This challenge lead to Travis Foundation which aims to to give everyone the right to be understood. Nick will take on the role of Executive Director, leading the foundation with the goal of bringing 20 lesser resourced languages into the digital age by 2020. These languages will be used for translation, education and preservation. “With the rise of AI and machine learning, we want to create equality within technology so that as the digital world progresses, people aren’t excluded” Nick, Executive Director of Travis Foundation.

Our Community
“We want to thank all our Indiegogo supporters, the community and our team for their support in bringing Travis from a concept to a company. We hope to further our experience in creating more understanding in the world and support meaningful initiatives get off the ground” Lennart, Brend and Nick.