Seeking Mobile App Development Co-Founder or Partner @ MIT-based Machine Vision X Knitting Startup

Our Project: StitchCounter Bot is bringing Machine Vision-based augmented reality to the knitting craft. Our first project (stitchcounter-bot.com) automates stitch counting for hobbyist knitters. Over 1,700 knitters have already volunteered and contributed training data to the project, producing over 15,000 example images to train our algorithms. We have been sponsored by brands including ChiaoGoo, Aroha Knits, MDK, Hannah Thiessen, Wing & A Prayer Farm, Lykke Needles, and Brooklyn Tweed. We are on track to launch in Summer 2021!

Our Team: Our leadership team is

  • Sahil, an MIT Ph.D. in Machine Learning with a decade of experience building a broad array of ML applications in NLP and Object Recognition

  • Darin, an MIT Ph.D. and fmr Management Consultant with McKinsey & Co., where he led over a dozen product development and commercialization programs

  • Wei Jing, the founder & owner of The WellKnit Co. (wellknit.co), a company that teaches knitting for wellness at companies, hospitals, and universities including Mass General, Vertex, and Mathworks

Product Details: See stitchcounter-bot.com for concept visual. Mobile App will count stitches for knitters: they hit a button to snap a photo, and our Machine Vision algorithms count the number of stitches and our confidence level. Deployment will eventually be on both Apple iOS and Android. Roadmap includes array of functional expansions including connecting to other knitting social platforms, allowing users to track and share their stitches and projects, recommending patterns and yarns, and implementing future ML functionality e.g., error identification, project classification, and row counting.

The Role: We are looking to add a cofounder or partner (part-time OK) to the team to lead development of the mobile application, and ideally some of the back-end architecture, as an alternative or supplement to outsourcing development

Responsibilities:

  • Work with Darin, Wei Jing, and our Design partners to refine and implement design of the App

  • Build the mobile application and/or lead outsourced development

  • Build back-end architecture for handling images, ML algorithms, etc.

  • Maintain Privacy & Security compliance with government regulations (GDPR, etc.), private regulations (Apple Store, Android), and best practices/ethical principles

  • Analyze/study trends in usage and interaction to improve design, add functionality, etc.

Ideal experience:

  • Do NOT need ML experience

  • Do NOT need UX/UI design experience (although it is always nice)

  • DO need Mobile App Development experience; ideal partner has developed a few Mobile Apps, ideally matching the polish and reliability standards of this user community

  • Knitters preferred!

Commitment & Compensation:

  • Part-time totally fine

  • Remote total fine

  • Happy to negotiate any combination of equity, cash, or other compensation

If interested, please reach out directly to darin.bellisario@gmail.com