Catherine Prada
Tactone lets blind and partially sighted people navigate unfamiliar buildings independently, guided entirely by voice.
Project
Tactone
URL
Year founded
2026
Business stage
Pre-Seed
High-growth sectors
Digital and Technologies
Sector
Infrastructure
Status
2026
Location
London
Funding
Funded Award Winner
The problem and opportunity
Indoor spaces are invisible to software. GPS stops at the door, so a blind person entering an unfamiliar hospital or public building has no reliable way to find their way inside. This affects the 2 million people in the UK living with sight loss, for whom independent indoor navigation remains a daily barrier to work, healthcare and public life. Existing indoor tools were built for tracking assets, not for guiding a person safely in real time.
The solution and innovation
Tactone gives blind people genuine independence indoors. Today, finding their way through an unfamiliar building means relying on external aids or others. Tactone lets someone ask in plain language and be guided through the space, step by step, by voice. At its core is the combination of highly accurate and reactive indoor positioning with a rich, structured layer of building knowledge unique to each space.
Market and ambition
Indoor navigation is set to grow from $11.8bn to $82.7bn by 2035. Tactone begins with blind and partially sighted users, then extends the same building intelligence toward a world where any building can be navigated, queried and understood in natural language.
Founder perspective
My background is in business, and I love solving hard, complex problems. That is exactly how Tactone was born. At the ETH Zürich InCube Challenge, I was locked in a glass cube for five days with four strangers, where we built Tactone and won, supported by Siemens. My aim is to build the interface between people and their environment, starting with those who need it most.
Women in Innovation Award
Recipient of an Innovate UK Women in Innovation Award 2025/26, receiving funding, tailored business support, and access to specialist training and networks. View all winners and highly commended applicants from the Women in Innovation cohort 2025/2026.