Nagish is a New York-based assistive-technology company that uses proprietary AI to caption phone calls in real time, converting speech to text and text to speech so people who are deaf or hard of hearing can make and receive calls independently and privately - without a human relay operator. Its name means 'accessible' in Hebrew. The company is one of the few firms certified by the FCC to provide telecommunication relay services and offers its consumer app for free.

Tomer Aharoni is the co-founder and CEO of Nagish, a New York startup using AI to caption phone calls in real time so Deaf and hard-of-hearing people can place and receive calls by typing and reading, with no human operator in the loop. The idea began with a phone ringing during a class at Columbia and a question he couldn't shake: how do you take a call if you can't hear or speak? Nagish (Hebrew for 'accessible') is now FCC-certified, offered free to users through federal subsidies, and has raised $16 million. Aharoni builds the product hand-in-hand with the Deaf community and is now pushing into AI sign-language translation.