Key Takeaways

Gill taught herself to code and won the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge.

She founded Vigil Inc. this year and looks forward to mass production by the end of 2025.

Shanya Gill, founder of AI technology company Vigil Inc. , kicked off her entrepreneurial journey in 2022, after a fire burned down the restaurant behind her San Jose, California home.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Vigil Inc. Shanya Gill.

“ We looked into it, and the restaurant did have smoke detectors,” Gill, 14, recalls. “It did have all of the proper safety equipment. But the issue is that smoke detectors take way too long to detect fires.”

Gill started to think about how fires could be detected earlier. Add-ons for stoves or other heating equipment existed, but they were expensive an

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