He turned his daughter’s 5 % vision into a €4 million classroom revolution
Antonio Sánchez Káiser never asked for a side hustle. He already had tenure, a fluid-dynamics lab and grad students who called him “profesor” with reverence. Then Vega arrived, squinting at a world that refused to come into focus. Her retinas deliver roughly the clarity of a fogged-up bus window; blackboard chalk is just ghost dust. One night in the NICU, Káiser stopped whispering apologies and started sketching camera arrays on a napkin. That 2 a.m. blueprint is now BemyVega, the Spanish ed-tech start-up that just sold its 100th installation before breakfast.
A phd in turbulence meets the chaos of inclusion
The system is brutally simple: three AI-cored cameras that hunt the lectern, the screen and the students’ faces, plus a cloud layer that spits out contrast-cranked, zoom-stabilised streams to any device. A low-vision user can pinch-zoom a PowerPoint slide until a single bullet point fills the entire iPad, or split the feed to watch the teacher’s lips and the whiteboard simultaneously. Colour-blind? Toggle palette filters in mid-lecture. Epileptic? The feed kills flash frames at 60 fps before the optic nerve even blinks.
The price tag for a 200-seat auditorium kit: €14,800. That is less than one ergonomic faculty chair in most North American universities, and it ships with a CC-AA licence—closed-captioned, audio-augmented—so the same box works for deaf students and dyslexic readers. No one wears a humiliating vest. “The dream is boring tech,” Káiser tells me inside a Murcia lecture hall where the ceiling rigs are nearly invisible. “If you notice it, we failed.”
Public tenders, private tears
Convincing cash-strapped municipalities felt like begging for oxygen. Early pilots ran on research grants and paternal desperation; Káiser remortgaged his house twice. The breakthrough came when Barcelona City Hall live-streamed an inclusive council session and the opposition leader admitted on camera that he could finally read the amendments without his assistant whispering. The clip went viral among accessibility clerks. Overnight, every Spanish town with an art centre or adult-ed classroom wanted the Cartagena contraption.
Revenue tells the rest: from €120 k in 2021 to €600 k in the first two months of 2025 alone. Head-count peaked at 25 engineers, most poached from telecoms giants who still can’t believe a university professor outbid them. In November, Inforges—a Galician IT conglomerate—bought majority stake, but left Káiser as CEO with carte blanche for R&D. The deal terms stay private, yet local papers whisper €12 million valuation and a three-year earn-out that could triple if the company hits 1,000 schools.
Why inforges and why now
Spain’s new accessibility law mandates real-time captioning in any public event over 50 attendees. Fines start at €30 k per violation. Instead of hiring stenographers who charge €200 an hour, event managers click “add to cart” on BemyVega’s site and receive a courier box 24 hours later. The SaaS layer also digests legacy content: upload last year’s MBA videos and the algorithm returns WCAG-compliant clips with voiceovers in five dialects. Corporations like Santander and Anaya have already signed multi-year licences, shortening the once glacial sales cycle to an average of 47 days.
Meanwhile, Vega—now 11—carries a pink Chromebook that auto-connects to any BemyVega node. She no longer eats recess alone; the fluorescent vests are gone, replaced by a friendship bracelet club that times its meetings to her zoom level. Káiser swipes through photos of kids building Lego cities on a cafeteria table. “She sees the pieces now,” he says, voice cracking only once. “That is the only metric that keeps me awake at night.”
The next frontier is not a classroom
Káiser’s lab is testing 8K micro-cameras the size of shirt buttons for theatre companies in Madrid. The goal: sell a €5 ticket upgrade that beams the lead actor’s sweat beads directly to a patron’s phone—whether the patron sits row A or suffers macular degeneration. Broadway producers have already scheduled demos. If the pilot flies, BemyVega could leap from education into live entertainment, a market worth €42 billion across Europe.
Back in Cartagena, the fluid-dynamics wind tunnel gathers dust. Káiser still teaches one graduate course, but only so he can draft interns who understand Navier-Stokes and won’t flinch at soldering 0402 resistors at 2 a.m. He laughs when asked if he misses pure research. “Turbulence is predictable,” he shrugs. “Kids are not.” The latest shipment leaves the warehouse at dusk: 40 kilograms of aluminium rigs bound for Valencia University, where 2,700 freshmen will start class next week without anyone knowing who in the room sees at 5 % and who sees at 100. The difference, for the first time, is irrelevant.