Written by Student Reporter, Elisabeth Sirumapea (Management 2020)

Hear Me company is an application that aims to facilitate communication between listeners and deaf friends who were established in January 2019 by four SBM ITB students from the Entrepreneurship major batch 2020. Its founders are Athalia Mutiara Laksmi, Safirah Nur Shabrina, Octiafani Isna Ariani, and Nadya Sahara Putri. The establishment is motivated by their experience. When ordering an online taxi, they got a deaf driver and he was accompanied by his daughter to facilitate communication with passengers. Therefore, Hear Me is designed as a solution to facilitate communication between listeners and deaf friends so that later there will be no gaps in communication, reduce discrimination, provide disability-friendly facilities and increase the rights of persons with disabilities.

Hear Me has participated in several competitions, namely the Swiss Innovation Challenge, in which it obtained the 2nd place, and Bandung Pitching Days, where it won the Best Innovation category. Currently, it became a DSCX winner. Hear Me has the motivation to take part in various competitions because initially, it aims to get capital for business, add relationships, add experience, add knowledge and insights for future business.

Athalia Mutiara Laksmi, CEO of Hear Me, who is often called Atha, told us a little about their experiences in participating in the competition, namely DSCX in November 2019. The Diplomat Success Challenge (DSC) is an entrepreneurial competition program that provides opportunities for young Indonesians who dare to be entrepreneurs to obtain a total venture capital grant of 2 billion, assistance and education.

In joining this competition, Atha learned to be a fast learner and struggled hard so that she could compete with other participants and be able to complete challenges with satisfying results. “Every night, we must evaluate and apply the material we received that day and always have a presentation every time,” she said. This is because there are 12,000 DSCX participants and the stages are quite difficult. However, in all of the challenges, they could defeat the other participants and they managed to become winners getting a total grand prize of IDR 250,000,000

“I was proud and relieved because I got a 2-year accompaniment gift and a 250 million grant,” Atha said with a smile.

Athalia hopes that in the future Hear Me can run this business and make the best use of this money so that they can realize their ideas and help people with disabilities improve their equality.

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