ABOUT US

ManoMotion’s story began with a bold vision — to move beyond the limits of touchscreen technology and make interaction truly natural. Right after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone with its revolutionary multi-touch technology, in 2009, our founder and CEO, Shahrouz Yousefi, imagined what would come next — a world where humans could interact with technology using nothing but their bare hands.

During his PhD at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Shahrouz began experimenting with computer vision to make that idea a reality. His project, called “gPhone” (short for gesture phone), explored how cameras could understand human hand movements and translate them into digital actions. But the computing power of smartphones in those days was limited — traditional vision algorithms were too heavy to run in real time.

Inspired by Google’s approach to indexing and pre-calculation, Shahrouz developed a novel visual search algorithm that stored and matched pre-computed visual data to achieve real-time gesture recognition — even on early smartphones. This breakthrough became the cornerstone of his PhD, earning him the Chester Carlson Award as Sweden’s Best Researcher of the Year in 2015.

With support from KTH Innovation, Shahrouz partnered with Professor Haibo Li, an esteemed researcher and visionary in multimedia and computer vision. Together they co-founded ManoMotion, with Haibo serving as Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) — guiding the company’s scientific strategy and deep-tech research foundation.

Soon after, a group of exceptional scientists and innovators, including Yeray Delgado and Thang Nguyen, joined the journey. Together ManoMotion built a proprietary AI framework capable of turning any standard camera into a powerful sensor that understands hands, gestures, and body movements — from close-range interactions to full-body recognition.

By 2017, ManoMotion achieved what few thought possible: real-time hand tracking, gesture recognition, and hand segmentation on a regular smartphone, long before devices like Apple Vision Pro made it mainstream. This pioneering work earned ManoMotion the Best Software Interaction Tool Award at AWE 2018 (USA), cementing its reputation as a global innovator in vision-based interaction.

As the XR market matured slower than expected, ManoMotion saw a bigger opportunity: industrial safety. Partnering with the German machinery leader Altendorf, ManoMotion adapted its XR technology to protect human hands in factories and workshops. Together, they achieved a historic milestone — the world’s first AI-based safety certification from IFA & BG in Germany.

Today, ManoMotion stands at the forefront of AI-driven industrial safety, supported by global technology partners like NVIDIA and Intel. Our mission is to transform traditional, reactive safety systems into predictive, intelligent, and camera-based solutions that prevent accidents before they happen — making workplaces smarter, safer, and more human-centric.

From mobile gesture control to full-body industrial safety, ManoMotion continues to redefine how humans and machines interact, enabling a future where technology understands us naturally — through vision.