Despite having trekked all the way from the Bronx down to Morningside Heights — and enduring train transfers and delays in the process — 17-year-old twins, entrepreneurs and full-time high school students Alp and Mert Kanıbir seemed to have retained every ounce of their energy throughout their over-an-hour-long journey.
As soon as they sat down, they started gabbing away in Turkish with me, talking about their train ride down, asking about how the interview would go, and explaining how they’d applied to colleges earlier that week. They were animated conversationalists, having much to say and to inquire about.
To the classic tell-me-about-yourselves question, they had a 25-minute long response — and even that extent of an answer does not do them justice. They told their story linearly, leading with their upbringing in Turkey, explaining the accident that led Alp to lose his eyesight, their subsequent move to New York until they eventually arrived at their project which was at the center of our conversation.
For more than a year now, the Kanıbirs have been working on an indoor navigation system called NAVINDOOR.
“Our business idea was to make visually impaired people independent in indoor spaces,” Alp Kanıbir said.
For the twins, NAVINDOOR was more than an idea — it was a necessity. In March 2022, back in Turkey, Alp Kanıbir encountered a freak accident involving a friend playing with a gun. The gun went off on Alp, which resulted in the permanent loss of his vision, and temporary loss of his autonomy.
Although born in Houston, Texas, Alp and Mert Kanıbir were raised in Erdek, a seaside town in the Turkish city of Balıkesir. “A beautiful town,” Alp Kanıbir said, but there were not enough resources there to support the blind in becoming independent.
So the Kanıbirs uprooted themselves in June 2022 and moved to the Williamsbridge neighborhood in the Bronx in pursuit of an education that would be more accommodating toward the…
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