When Mark Morad could not find a tool that worked for him, he built one himself.

Mark is a 20-year-old visually impaired student entrepreneur from Cairo, Egypt. He is the founder of ScribeMe, an AI-powered app designed to help blind users navigate the world around them in real time. gives users a hands-free experience that describes their surroundings, answers questions through a phone’s camera, and supports 20 languages including Arabic. Consequently, thousands of people across 140 countries now uses the app and it has integrated with Meta smart glasses.

The idea came from a personal gap Mark could not ignore. As a student, he struggled with screen-reading apps that went silent whenever they encountered charts, diagrams, or equations. He reached out to app developers abroad who were working on similar problems. However, none of them replied so he took matters into his own hands.

Mark Built Without a Road map

Mark had no formal coding background. He taught himself through YouTube tutorials and kept building until he had a working product by 2023. That kind of self-driven learning: figuring things out without a teacher, a mentor, or even a response from the people he looked up to, is what sits at the heart of his story.

His persistence eventually paid off. Winning recognition at the Vodafone AI Assistive Tools Hackathon in 2024 brought in a co-founder and gave ScribeMe the momentum it needed to grow beyond its original scope.

From a Personal Problem to a Global Product

What started as a solution to a specific frustration has grown into something much larger. Users can download the app for free on iPhones and Android devices, with additional features available through a subscription. It helps users identify their surroundings, recognize shops, choose outfits, find classrooms, and study. This gives them independence in situations where most existing tools fall short.

The Arabic language support was a deliberate decision. Mark noticed that every competing tool had ignored it. That gap, like the one that started everything, became an opportunity.

His story is a straightforward reminder that the best products are often built by the people who need them most, and that waiting for someone else to solve your problem is rarely the fastest route forward.