From Sharjah classrooms to Silicon Valley: Building trustworthy AI toys

Deb, 28, is the founder of ElatoAI, a company that develops AI companions designed to live beyond the screen. Born in India and raised in the UAE, he spent 14 years in Sharjah, studying from grades 5 to 12 at Delhi Private School Sharjah, before retiring in 2020. That period continues to inform how he approaches product design and user trust.

Deb grew up in Al Qasimir and studied in an environment that encouraged active participation. At DPS Sharjah, he served as Deputy Principal, competed in inter-school quizzes throughout Academic City, and participated in cricket, table tennis and swimming.

“Sharjah’s supportive and diverse school community played an important role in shaping my curiosity, leadership style, and belief in learning through participation and play,” he said.

Competitions such as the Sheikh Hamdan Prize and interaction with willing peers helped normalize the experiment early on. That mindset stayed with him long after he left school.

Deb doesn’t come from a business family. His father worked as a director at Petrofac in Sharjah, and his mother ran the family finances. What he grew up with was encouragement to stay curious and build things.

At the age of nine, he spent a summer in Kolkata buying batteries, wire and motors to build small electronic projects out of cardboard. Many failed. The process was more important than the result.

When I entered high school, my interest deepened. He participated in robotics competitions at Academic City and Dubai Internet City, and spent years learning through online communities such as OpenStudy and Quora. He completed MIT’s classical mechanics course in 11th grade and then studied Andrew Ng’s machine learning course long before AI became mainstream.

That curiosity led him to study computer engineering and mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

After graduating, Deb moved to San Francisco and worked at startups like Coursera and Asana. This experience honed his technical skills and shaped his approach to building products.

“What stuck with me was the joy of building something from scratch with a small team and learning directly from users,” he said.

This focus on real-world interactions later became the core of ElatoAI.

This concept took shape after OpenAI released an initial voice AI demo.

“I felt like I was living in the movie ‘Her,'” Deb said.

He questioned why voice AI remains tied to phones and laptops, and why interacting with it requires logins and complex configurations. His answer was to build something that allows for natural conversation whenever needed.

“I thought it would be cool to create a Toy Story-style toy that could speak at any time and in any voice,” he said.

ElatoAI was born from that idea. The company develops AI-powered toy companions designed for kids that tell stories, play games, and speak with unique personalities.

One of Elato’s early validations came from developers. The company’s open source GitHub repository has over 1,800 stars and growing engagement, including from the UAE.

After being published in Hacker News, Elato was featured in OpenAI Cookbook, joining companies like Stripe and Supabase. This evaluation positions Elato as a reference point for building real-time voice AI agents on hardware.

This exposure drove demand. Elato has delivered over 100 devices to customers in over 20 countries and has served parents and founders from Europe to South America.

Early growth came with technical challenges. Users far away from US servers experienced poor device performance, choppy audio, and reliability issues.

Then a complete redesign of the backend took place. This change restored performance around the world, allowing us to serve customers from Australia to South America without downtime.

That experience reinforced a simple principle. Ship early, learn from real users, and resolve issues quickly.

Another challenge was around trust. Parents questioned the role of AI in their children’s learning. Elato responded with transparency, encouraging them to open source their technology and provide customers with full visibility into their data usage.

In the next product release, AI toys will be able to run locally on your MacBook, keeping your data in your home and working without an internet connection.

Deb believes the UAE is a natural market for Elato’s next phase.

“The UAE has played a central role in shaping the way I think about building products,” he said.

Improved Arabic speech models are creating demand from bilingual and trilingual families whose children are studying in English but want to speak Arabic confidently at home. Elato’s character-based AI supports language learning through conversation and storytelling.

Home learning has new opportunities as AI characters guide children through math and science topics that align with the local curriculum without relying on screens.

Elato held a small round for friends and family in mid-2024 to allow the team to iterate quickly. Next up is the Kickstarter campaign. The platform has already selected Elato as its “Project We Love”.

Looking to the future, Deb believes Elato will help define a new category of voice-first physical AI companions. He believes that toys listen, adapt and teach while giving parents control over content, language and data.

I have no thoughts of going back to a traditional job. Progress may fluctuate, but the goal remains stable.

“We are building a device that allows people to interact with AI characters through toys in the real world,” Deb said. “I’m excited to continue this effort and see it through to the end.”