Anand Chowdhary
| Anand Chowdhary | |
|---|---|
 anand-chowdhary-facebook-event.jpeg Chowdhary speaking at a Facebook event in 2017 | |
| Born | 1997/12/29 New Delhi, India |
| 🏡 Residence | Netherlands |
| 🏳️ Nationality | Indian |
| 🎓 Alma mater | University of Twente, Santa Clara University |
| 💼 Occupation | |
| 🌐 Website | https://anandchowdhary.com |
| Twitter=AnandChowdhary | |
Anand Chowdhary is an Indian entrepreneur and creative technologist. He is noted for his work on web accessibility and was the CEO of Oswald Labs, an accessibility technology company, and is currently the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Pabio, a Swiss interior design and furnish subscription company.
Early Life[edit]
While studying in The Mother's International School, Chowdhary was the President of the computer club, MINET. He redesigned the official website of the school and was featured in the cover story of Time Out magazine. He founded an education technology company, Class Rebels and was a volunteer at Uday Foundation. He also started Made with Love in India, an initiative to promote Indian brands and products, which is supported by companies including Snapdeal and Hike Messenger.
In June 2017, Chowdhary organized BharatHacks, a hackathon to solve India-specific problems, in collaboration with DigitalOcean, IBM Global Entrepreneur, the Delhi-NCR chapter of Facebook's Developer Circles, HackerEarth, and other technology companies.
After graduation from highschool, Chowdhary worked at the Government of Delhi. He expanded upon a 2012 research done by Luz Rello and Ricardo Baeza-Yates for the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative.
Career[edit]
Oswald Labs[edit]
In June 2016, Chowdhary shared his idea of developing an accessibility tool with fellow schoolmate Nishant Gadihoke, and they decided to develop a Chrome extension during the AngelHack Delhi 2016 hackathon. After the development of the tool, they purchased the domain oswald.foundation on August 14, 2016 and founded Oswald Foundation on India's Independence Day on August 15, 2016. Chowdhary dropped out of Unitedworld Institute of Design to start Oswald Foundation, where he was studying Visual communication.
Oswald Foundation is incubated in the London and Berlin-based EyeFocus Accelerator, a startup accelerator program for companies developing for living with visual impairment. On April 8, 2017, Oswald Foundation qualified to the finals of The Economic Times's Catapoolt Changemakers Challenge after winning the first round in Delhi. In June 2017, Oswald Foundation raised ₹100,000 in a crowdfunding campaign.
Oswald Foundation has three products: Agastya, Shravan, and Valmiki. Agastya is a cross-platform JavaScript library and web accessibility plug-in for websites. Shravan is an operating system for smartphones and tablet computers based on the Android mobile platform. It uses vibrational and speech feedback as its primary user interface and has special features that makes it more accessible than regular smartphone operating systems. Valmiki is a browser extension based on independent research done by the British Dyslexia Association and the World Wide Web Consortium to allow people with dyslexia or visual impairment access the web.
Pabio[edit]
In 2020, Chowdhary cofounder Pabio, a Switzerland-based company that provides interior design and furniture as a service. His co-founder, Carlo Badini, was previously the founder of Swiss design studio Cleverclip.
Awards and recognition[edit]
- Chowdhary was the winner of Startup India Rocks! in Bengaluru
- Chowdhary is an IBM Global Entrepreneur
- Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2018
- Het Financieele Dagblad (Dutch Financial Times) listed him as one of the most-innovative entrepreneurs and professionals in the Netherlands
- The Next Web listed him in TNW 500 in 2018, 2019, and 2021
- YourStory listed Chowdhary in their first "21 under 21" list
- Chowdhary won the GitHub Stars award in 2021, presented by Microsoft-owned GitHub to the most influential open-source maintenaners
- Chowdhary was awarded the global civilian honor Karmaveer Chakra Award by iCONGO in partnership with United Nations
