So what are you doing with your life? Meet the teenage wonder kid, 16, who’s developing a smart watch to keep women safe (and he’ll be half-way through uni when he finishes school)
- Kaushal Reddy is still a grade 10 student at St Andrews Christian College
- He also runs a company on the side designing technology for the future
- The 16-year-old hopes to help develop robots and technology to help people
A 16-year-old tech prodigy who migrated to Australia as a child is developing technology to help struggling farmers and protect women from violence.
Kaushal Reddy Ottem, 16, is only in year 10 at St Andrews Christian College in Melbourne, but when he finishes his homework of a night he spends time building his IT company, K Kite Enterprises.
The teenager is designing a smart watch which he hopes will help keep women safe by having an in-built alarm system to alert authorities of their location at the press of a button.
He hopes it will be available to buy in 2023 – by which time he expects to have a double degree and a masters.
‘Its a bit different to most people my age, but sometimes you have to sacrifice things for other things to get ahead,’ he told Daily Mail Australia.
Kaushal Reddy Ottem with his family on the day they received Australian citizenship
Kaushal and his family know sacrifice. Both his parents left behind jobs as professors in India to migrate to Australia.
Mum and dad actually arrived several years before him, to build a life for the family while Kaushal and his younger sister stayed behind in India with his grandparents.
He came over when he was nine in 2013.
‘I found it really challenging when I first arrived. I had to re-do year four so that I could match up with Australian standards,’ he said.
But once he got here, he was really able to flourish and took a liking to information technologies.
‘I always loved computers, but I excelled once I got to Australia. I didn’t have the facilities back in India… It’s the IT world here, we’ve got so much access, computers in schools and everything,’ he said.
He continued to read up on hundreds of coding languages in his bedroom and taught himself 90 of those languages. He is fluent in about 47 of them, but wants to learn all 700.
While Kaushal is the sole founder and director of his company, his father plays the role of managing director, driving him to meetings and taking care of him.
Kaushal Reddy Ottem, 16, founded his own company designing new technology. He said he sometimes misses his regular childhood but knows he has made the right choice
Kaushal has several sub contractors who help him, and is working to develop and grow the future of the IT industry.
‘We do artificial intelligence, robotics, anything that is about 10 years ahead. We want to create a robot that can follow you around and help you.’
Primarily, his goal is to make people’s lives better.
‘Humans, we need to value them,’ Kaushal said. ‘We don’t want to become a mechanical world.
‘We are turning our focus to farmers and the farmer suicides in India, in Australia and around the world.
‘We want to know how we can do more technology farming in a healthy way,’ he said.
He is hoping to expand on technology which offers farmers a reprieve by milking cows using robotic hands and warning them about the likelihood of natural disasters.
Kaushal currently doesn’t turn a profit with his company, and says he works so hard because he is passionate about technology, not money.
He does have plans to expand in the future, and says as he continues to develop technologies that come to fruition, he will begin making money, but he isn’t in any hurry.
Kaushal is on track to finish his Bachelors and Masters degree at RMIT in Melbourne in IT in half the time it would normally take under a scheme to fast track his qualifications.
Kaushal Reddy Ottem still enjoys activities outside of IT, including cricket, but says IT development is his passion