A note from Abhinav

Meet the founder

I’m Abhinav Alwarappan, an 18-year-old student and developer from Adelaide, Australia, now living in Flower Mound, Texas. I built Keiro because I saw how quickly a language barrier can make a simple, important conversation difficult.

Abhinav Alwarappan · Flower Mound, Texas

Finding room to build

I grew up in Adelaide and attended Pembroke School. After visiting the United States, I became interested in what life there might be like and encouraged my parents to consider moving. In December 2024, my family relocated to the Dallas area.

Starting at a large American public high school halfway through sophomore year took some adjustment. I had to learn a different school system, make new friends, and find my place. Over time, that change also gave me more confidence to follow the things I was curious about: computer science, products, and entrepreneurship. I now attend Flower Mound High School, and Keiro has become one of my main independent projects.

The experience that started Keiro

My grandmother primarily speaks Tamil and has limited English. During a family trip through a New York airport, she needed wheelchair assistance. My younger brother and I tried to translate while she spoke with the person helping her.

Nothing dramatic happened. It was simply harder than it should have been for her to explain what she needed. I kept thinking about that afterward: a person can know exactly what they need and still struggle to communicate it because the person in front of them does not speak their language.

In healthcare, where the details of what someone feels matter, that gap becomes even more important.

That experience stayed with me and eventually became the starting point for Keiro. The idea was not to make decisions for a patient or a doctor. It was to help someone say what they already know about their own experience, in the language that comes naturally to them.

From an idea to a working product

I began developing Keiro as an independent software project. A lot of the learning happened through the work itself: building an early version, finding what did not work, and going back to improve it.

Today, Keiro supports 45 languages. A patient can speak or type in the language they prefer. Kai, the assistant inside Keiro, can ask a few simple follow-up questions and organize the answers into a clear English summary for a healthcare provider. Keiro does not diagnose or recommend treatment. Its job is communication.

Turning the idea into something usable has meant working across the whole product: the interface, speech and language support, the systems behind it, accessibility, privacy, mobile behavior, and the less visible work of testing and reliability. The interesting part for me is not the length of that list. It is learning how all of those pieces have to come together before software can be genuinely useful to someone.

Why it matters

Useful technology should make difficult things easier for ordinary people. For patients who face a language barrier, even describing when a symptom started or how it has changed can become stressful.

Keiro is not a replacement for a doctor or a professional medical interpreter. It is a way to help patients gather and communicate information they might otherwise have trouble explaining. I want it to feel accessible and understandable, especially for someone who is already nervous or uncomfortable with technology.

What comes next

The next step is to work with clinics, listen carefully to patients and healthcare staff, and improve Keiro through real feedback. I expect that process to uncover things I have not considered yet. That is the point of doing it.

My hope is straightforward: that Keiro can help more people walk into a healthcare conversation with a clearer way to explain what they are feeling. There is still a lot to learn and build, and I am looking forward to the work.

Abhinav

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