Ashutosh

Who received this grant?

Ashutosh is 18 and from Logan in Queensland. He has spent most of his life learning to read his younger brother, who was diagnosed with autism at two. He knows what the small sounds mean, and the gestures, and the frustration when neither is enough. He also knows how much is in there that never makes it out.

Communication tools exist, but the good ones are expensive and the affordable ones are limited. For a family like his, that gap is not a market problem. It is the difference between a child being understood at home and not.

So he set out to close it himself. He is building PEETA, an affordable and accessible AAC tool that brings speech, sign language and body language together in one place, so that neurodiverse people have more than one way to be heard.

What was this grant used for?

Ashutosh won the 2026 Future Accelerator and received a microgrant to turn his prototype into a working product. His plan had three parts:

• Develop the prototype into a robust, usable app
• Meet with speech therapists to make sure it worked for the people who would prescribe it
• Find a technology partner with the capacity to build it properly

WHAT IT ENABLED (itemised by Ashutosh)
App development software licence
Cloud hosting and backend services
Developer account   

What has the grant achieved in 3 months?

Ashutosh has built the app. PEETA is functional, which means it is no longer a prototype he demonstrates but something a person can pick up and use to make themselves understood. 

In July, we nominated Ashutosh to speak at the Global Impact Summit and arranged fully sponsored flights to bring him to Sydney. He stood in front of a thousand people and told them about his brother, and why a tool like this needs to exist

Days later he was at Microsoft's headquarters, sitting with executives who had heard him speak. He walked out with their support on the development of the app, which gives him engineering capacity he could not have bought at any price.

He has started bringing speech therapists onto the platform. They are the people who put tools like this into a family's hands, so every therapist who joins is a direct route to the children PEETA was built for.

His goal by the end of the year is to have more speech therapists using PEETA with their clients. An 18-year-old from Logan who set out to give his brother a voice is now building one for thousands of people he has never met.

How it happened

What does he need next?

Ashutosh is looking for speech therapists and speech pathologists willing to use PEETA with their clients and tell him what needs to change. He would also like to hear from families already using AAC tools, because the people living with the current options know best where they fall short.