In February 2025, our co-founder Amirali Rezaei stepped onto the stage at Accelerate: Citizens Make Change, the Cleveland Leadership Center’s civic pitch competition, to make the case for learning sign language. He left as the event’s first triple winner, taking the technovation, education and college categories against 23 other presenters.

The win came during Amirali’s first year at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

The pitch

Amirali told the story AISA started from. At 16, he and co-founder Reza Sadeghi sat in a cafe in Iran and realized that neither of them had ever met a Deaf person. About half a billion people live with hearing loss, and communication gaps keep many Deaf people out of everyday social settings.

AISA was their answer: technology that helps Deaf and hearing people meet in the middle, starting with an app that helps hearing people learn sign language. Back then the team was eight college students in several countries who tested their work with the Deaf community in Iran, and Amirali was the only one based in the United States.

Three categories, one night

AISA won all three categories it entered. No one had done that at Accelerate before. Joan Palumbo, the Cleveland Leadership Center’s chief advancement officer, summed it up: “Amirali is the perfect example of why we host this event.”