Catalin Voss

Autism Therapy Google Glass Collaborator

Catalin Voss is a German student entrepreneur at Stanford University. Voss founded the computer vision startup Sension during his freshman year at Stanford’s startup accelerator StartX, where he is an Innovator in Residence. Sension gained traction for developing expression recognition software used in education and for developing a Google Glass app to aid people with Autism in recognizing social cues. Before, Voss worked in mobile software engineering with the startup PayNearMe. Voss grew up and graduated from Leonardo Da Vinci Gymnasium high school near Heidelberg, Germany. He was interested in technology from a young age. When he was twelve, he taught himself the basics of mobile software development when iPhone apps first became popular. A year later, he started a German podcast about iOS development. Voss’s tutorials quickly gained > 200,000 views and became the #1 podcast on the German iTunes store. In 2009, he began working with a startup in Stuttgart on iPhone apps for the U.S. Army stationed in Europe and launched five applications before he turned 15. Steve Capps hired Voss as a software engineer in 2010 to work on his Silicon Valley startup PayNearMe’s mobile product. Voss worked on the company’s iPhone, Android, and web platforms and helped launch a mobile cash payments platform. In 2012, Voss joined Stanford University at age 17 to pursue a degree in Computer Science (advisee of Professors Terry Winograd and Jerry Cain). During the same year, Voss advised the executive team of Germany’s largest media company Axel Springer on structuring a technology partnership between a Silicon Valley outpost and Germany. His role gained national attention when the German magazine DER SPIEGEL covered his work in 2013. Today, As an IIR in the StartX program, Voss advises StartX’s founders on mobile engineering.