What happened to Motionsavvy

7 min readJun 13, 2023

Opening Note

It has been over 6+ years since the last update on Motionsavvys Indiegogo campaign. Some of you are wondering why no further updates were ever given and below is my explanation.

This is not going to be a fun announcement. But it is going to be an honest one. After years of trying, I finally am able to access this campaign, and you may be wondering didn’t I start this? And yes, this requires some explanation on my end.

What was Motionsavvy?

Motionsavvy was a deaf-owned company focused on translation tools for the deaf and hard of hearing using gesture recognition technology. The company won awards like Time Magazine’s Top 25 Inventions of 2014.

The Campaign

Part of finding capital was validating our market, our lead investor encouraged us to launch an IndieGoGo campaign, and we successfully raised $45,000 as seen below.

The $45,000 was stored in a different bank account and we used this to continue to validate our roadmap to possible investors to close our fundraising round.

The goal was if the company ever shuts down, this money would be returned, unfortunately, that never happened.

Our Investors

For some more context, Motionsavvy started this by winning the next big idea contest at NTID. Afterward, over a few years time, we raised about $700,000 from SOSV, Wells Fargo, and RIT to continue building out the product which was a huge achievement for deaf entrepreneurs.

List of Investors in Motionsavvy

Because of this investment and our first time running a business, I as interim CEO felt quite overwhelmed and when RIT made the suggestion of they would take over the process of finding a new CEO, we agreed as we felt they were more experienced to make the right decision.

So I and the team signed the paperwork and handed over the entire process of selecting the new CEO of Motionsavvy to the RIT board and RIT CFO.

My last announcement

Over the course of the IndieGoGo campaign, I made 16 updates all seen here. The customers and I were in constant communication. Below is my very last announcement before the new CEO took over.

I didn’t know it at the time, but when I made the above announcement to the deaf community about the new CEO. This was the very last time Motionsavvy as a company spoke to its customers.

My Departure

I stepped down and Ron Pottengill was chosen by the RIT board to lead Motionsavvy as its new CEO. Initially, I was very excited, but a few months into the hire, I realize this person is very much the wrong fit to run Motionsavvy, he refuses to learn sign language, wouldn’t take any ASL classes, and constantly failed at accessibility in day to day office work. I questioned why RIT would consider this person a good fit for Motionsavvy.

After several communications to the investors, whom all happen to be hearing as well, I’ve concluded there was no way to reverse this process, I effectively handed the keys to RIT and agreed to a process I had zero insight on how they selected this person, it was a big question mark to this day I do not have an answer on.

I ended up leaving my own company a few months later out of protest, at that time, the company had a CEO, CTO, and approx 5–7 employees. I left thinking that Motionsavvy had a future and there was nothing more I could do so I moved on with my life.

What I didn’t expect is this CEO to run the company into the ground and never communicate anything to our customers. He turned Motionsavvy into a ghost, with no further capital raised, no communications ever to any of our customers, and the company eventually shut down without saying anything.

The community started targeting me

Because the new CEO never continued communication and I was the last person to make contact, many members of the deaf community started contacting me as seen here.

I’ve struggled to gain access to the IndieGoGo page so I can update the supporters but because I gave up control to RIT, I no longer had the authority, so this page was to remain frozen in time which was unacceptable to me. So for the last 7 years, I’ve been emailing IndieGoGo with no luck till now.

Update* Finally as of May 2023, I can access the Indiegogo page and will be putting a link to this closing letter there.

All of our social media channels are still up

Here are all of our social media channels, frozen in time, I have constantly tried to take them down with no luck.

So what happened?

So what ultimately happened at the end? With some research, I discovered this:

Because the new CEO failed at raising money months into his hire and the company was running out of cash to pay employees, Alex, the last co-founder still on the team launched a company called Signing Miners. This was a cryptocurrency mining business on the side to try to generate some revenue.
Alex started to juggle both Motionsavvy and Signing Miners with some initial success and moved out of the Venture Creations (RIT Building) into another warehouse, only in this case, used Motionsavvy as the company renting the warehouse thereby mixing the two businesses up.
Signing Miners backfired so badly, lost a lot of customer money, and Motionsavvy was sued by the landlord because of a 6-year warehouse lease and unexpectedly got involved with this legal fight.

At this point, details become so vague that I don’t exactly know what happened to Motionsavvy afterward and Alex and Ron, the last people in charge of the company are not responding to me.

It’s been approx. 7 years since I left and can only assume Motionsavvy is dead as a company, I confirmed that board members started departing in 2019 but other than that, I have very little information on how the end of the company looked like.

Just frustrating to think that all this time some of the old leadership like Alex could log in here and make an update to the community but they never did, they choose to stay silent as the company shuts down and leave the supporters wondering what happened and where their money went.

Last Thoughts

It’s important to note that Rochester Insitute of Technology invested $125,000 and requested control over the CEO selection process, through that, they choose a hearing CEO that never helped us raise more money beyond the initial $700,000 that the founders raised, and never found more business partners, its unfortunate to say but this person achieved nothing during his time at Motionsavvy.

I thought accepting RIT’s terms would supercharge our growth, but instead that investment led to the destruction of Motionsavvy, there were other factors sure, but I strongly believe if a deaf-friendly leader was in place, work culture would be secured, and being able to raise more money off the vision by sharing personal stories on communication barriers would continue to work while the tech side worked towards commercial success.

Conclusion

I hope this post helps our supporters understand why a project you supported and invested in failed in the worst way possible. I deeply regret the chain of events and apologize for this project impacting the community that I love in such a negative way.

This medium article is a documented online use case that is now filed away. This can be referenced to any time in the future by any other deaf entrepreneurs.

There are two things that I’m working on that deeply take these lessons above to heart.

I launched GoSign.AI as Motionsavvy 2.0 and will never give up leadership control to any hearing investors like RIT again. We’re in the process of building up similar technologies and the right deaf-led team but it will take time.
I have made it one of my missions at GoSign.AI to engage and educate leaders in positions of power that may lack the knowledge needed to empower and cultivate more deaf leaders that come out of institutions like RIT.

If any of you want to reach out to me and talk about this further, you can do so at Ryan@GoSign.AI