Catalin Voss

Sension: Co-Founder

Catalin Voss is an 18-year-old German student entrepreneur at Stanford University. Voss founded the computer vision startup Sension during his freshman year at Stanford’s startup accelerator StartX, where he is an Innovator in Residence. Sension gained traction for developing expression recognition software used in education and for developing a Google Glass app to aid people with Autism in recognizing social cues. Before, Voss worked in mobile software engineering with the startup PayNearMe traveling frequently between Germany and Silicon Valley since he was 15 years old.

Voss grew up and graduated from Leonardo Da Vinci Gymnasium high school near Heidelberg, Germany. He was interested in technology as a child and built his first robots and websites at the age of nine. When he was twelve, he taught himself the basics of mobile software development when iPhone apps first became popular. A year later, he started a German podcast about iOS development to share his learning experience with others. Voss tutorials quickly gained > 200,000 views and became the #1 podcast on the German iTunes store. In 2009, he began working with a startup in Stuttgart on iPhone apps for the U.S. Army stationed in Europe and launched five applications before he turned 15. Steve Capps, Microsoft fellow and creator of Apple’s Macintosh and Newton, hired Voss as a software engineer in 2010 to work on his Silicon Valley startup PayNearMe’s mobile product. Voss worked on the company’s iPhone, Android, and web platforms and helped launch a mobile cash payments platform, resulting in his first software patent applications. 

In 2012, Voss joined Stanford University at age 17 to pursue a degree in Computer Science as an advisee of Professors Terry Winograd and Jerry Cain. During the same year, Voss advised the executive team of Germany's largest media company Axel Springer on structuring a substainable partnership between Silicon Valley and Germany. His role gained national attention when the German magazine DER SPIEGEL covered his work. Today, as an IIR in the StartX program, Voss advises StartX’s founders on mobile engineering.