Chinese, Japanese & Korean Translator by Waygo

Waygo is an app that is changing the way expats, tourists, and business travelers experience Asia and pictorial languages.

Utilizing a combination of Optical Character Recognition and machine translation, Waygo translates Chinese, Japanese & Korean characters into English text by seeing images, finding the relevant text, and finally creating sensible phrases. Waygo does not require an internet connection to operate. Companies that enter the field of OCR spend many years getting their solution to work, let alone be any good. We are no different. Our team has been working on our in-house, proprietary algorithms for about two years and it has paid off. When benchmarked against ABBYY (the top commercial OCR) our software is five times faster, two times more accurate, and a tenth of the file size.

The Waygo Team

Ryan Rogowski

Co-founder & CEO

Before Waygo, Ryan was working in Beijing at Thinknao and learning Chinese. He hails from Naperville, IL and studied electrical engineering and linguistics at University of Illinois. He speaks Mandarin and passed the new HSK 5 fluency test. Also enjoys snowboarding, motorcycles, and backpacking. Follow @Ryan_Rogowski

Kevin Clark

Co-founder & Director of Product

A Rhode Island native, Kevin returned home after completing a Masters in Electrical Engineering at Colorado School of Mines. Before Waygo, Kevin almost took a position as an Apprentice Brewer at a local microbrewery. Kevin enjoys brewing and drinking tasty beer, cooking, baseball, the ocean, dogs, and playing music. If you’re lucky, you’ll get your hands on his complete cover (instruments and vocals) of Nirvana’s 1991 release, Nevermind. Follow @kevinclark311

Huan-Yu Wu

Co-founder & Director of Technology

Before Waygo, Huan-Yu was in research at Boston University after finishing his Masters in Image Processing. Fun facts? Although born and raised in Taiwan, Huan-Yu has never been to mainland China. He can recognize thousands of pieces of classical music, even able to guess the composer of a piece he’s never heard. Follow @HuanYuWu

Herman Schaaf

Full Stack Software Engineer

Originally from South Africa, Herman is an avid traveler who has lived for several years in Taiwan and Japan, and once spent a year traveling as a nomad through Asia. Having started programming at a young age, his passion is using computers to solve real-world problems. Follow @ironzeb

Chi-Hao Tsai

Software Engineer

After training as an image processing engineer in Taiwan, Chi-Hao joined Waygo through his connection with Huan-Yu, whom he knew since college in a wind ensemble. Chi-Hao loves music, cooking, traveling, and watching ball games. He enjoys being a dad to his sweet little daughter. Fun fact? Chi-Hao and Ryan lived just a few blocks away in Champaign, IL when Ryan was studying at the University of Illinois, but they never met each other until Chi-Hao joined Waygo several years later.

Ali Murphy

Social Media & Blog

Hosting international exchange students growing up resulted in Ali’s passion for cultural exchange. During college she studied abroad in Nanjing and worked in the USA Pavilion at 2010 Shanghai Expo. Has a tie-dye clothing biz for babies and loves to rollerblade. Follow @murph_alicious

Waygo's Roots

The idea for Waygo came about two years ago as Ryan was working in China building mobile games. He was in the process of learning Chinese and found it extremely difficult, especially for someone used to romance languages. If only there were a tool that he could look up characters by simply pointing a phone camera at the text, his--and many others--lives would become much easier. At first the idea was an educational tool, but eventually it grew in Ryan's head that this could help any traveler in any country see with new eyes. Ryan, Kevin, and Huan-Yu met in Providence, RI through the Betaspring incubator program where they founded the company, created the first prototype, and eventually launched their first alpha version of the app.

The team was then invited to the 500 Startups accelerator program in Mountain View, CA where they grew the team and launched their first fully-featured, premium version of Waygo. We decided to first focus on China and the East Asian market because that's where our team had the most experience and it was also the most difficult batch of languages to solve and we were up for the challenge! Our roots have provided a solid foundation and we are excited for what we have in the works--improvements and future app versions.

Why The Name Waygo?

Waygo helps travelers go to a foreign country, or 外国 (“wài guó”) in Chinese. After discovering Americans have difficulty pronouncing Chinese, we adapted the pinyin to the English language.