From Student to Startup: How Zülal Tannur Build Inclusive AI?

An inclusive AI Project: From Your Eyes to NeuroVision AI Tech Inc., the 23-year-old founder shows how a student idea can become a global AI company.

Her journey began the day she was born with a 95% visual disability. Diagnosed in infancy, her family moved from Northern Cyprus to Istanbul to seek better healthcare and opportunities. Technology soon became her bridge to the world: computers, screen readers, and early assistive tools allowed her to learn, grow, and imagine beyond limits. By her teenage years, she was already experimenting with projects that combined empathy and engineering.

Building AI for Accessibility

At 21, she founded FROM YOUR EYES, a mobile app that uses artificial intelligence and volunteers to describe images for people with visual disabilities. The AI delivers a caption in just seven seconds; if users want more detail, a global network of volunteers responds in about two minutes. Together, machine learning and human insight create richer, more reliable descriptions.

The platform now reaches beta users across 27 countries, has generated over 8,000 descriptions, and continues to improve as volunteer contributions refine the AI model. It’s a simple yet powerful example of human-in-the-loop AI, where technology and people enhance each other.

From Vision to Scale

Zülal didn’t stop there. By 23, she launched her second venture, NeuroVision AI Tech Inc., scaling from Türkiye to Silicon Valley. The company’s focus is ambitious:

• Smart Mobility: Embedding artificial vision into next-generation vehicles.

• Urban Perception Infrastructure: Designing AI systems that help cities and machines “see.”

• Federated Intelligence: Pushing beyond centralised AI toward more secure and inclusive AI.

These projects aren’t just about accessibility; they’re about reshaping how AI interacts with the physical world.

The Ecosystem That Backed Her

Behind this rapid growth is also the Microsoft ecosystem, which recognized Zülal’s potential early on.

• At 18, she was named one of Microsoft’s youngest global tech leaders.

• At 22, she won the Imagine Cup World Championship, receiving $100,000 in funding and a mentorship session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

• In 2025, she became the EMEA Winner of the Microsoft Women Power Awards, a title usually reserved for leaders with decades of experience.

Through Imagine Cup, Microsoft for Startups, and GitHub for Startups, she gained capital and tools like Azure, mentorship, visibility, and credibility that helped open doors to partnerships, including with giants like NVIDIA.

As she puts it:

“Imagine Cup didn’t just support us it believed in what we could become. That belief was our big bang.”

Her rapid rise also highlights a generational shift in entrepreneurship. Zülal represents a wave of young founders building profitable companies and weaving social impact into their core mission with Inclusive AI. For her, accessibility is not a feature to be added later; it is the starting point. She shows how technology can answer real human needs while competing on a global stage by embedding inclusion (Inclusive AI) at the heart of both From Your Eyes and NeuroVision AI Tech.

Inclusive AI: Redefining Leadership

Today, Zülal is recognized as the world’s first blind Technology Ambassador, leading international teams where inclusion is a principle and practice. Her story proves innovation doesn’t always start in boardrooms; it can begin in dorms, hackathons, or late-night coding sessions.

What makes her journey stand out is her resilience and her vision: that AI must be inclusive. By blending her personal experience, cutting-edge research, and the right partnerships, she has created companies that change how people with disabilities interact with the world and how cities may function in the future.

Zülal Tannur’s story proves that technology can be more than code; it can be a bridge. Her work shows what happens when personal determination, inclusive AI, and strong ecosystems unite.

Perhaps the lesson for future innovators is simple: when you dare to see further, the world begins to look different, too.

Inclusive AI can make our lives better and easier.