Rugby School student makes 2024 Forbes list

Mariella Satow, who left Rugby School in 2022 and is the founder of SignUp Captions, has been named in the 2024 Forbes list of entrepreneurs under the age of 30 making a social impact – ‘leveraging business smarts to save the world’.

While studying for her A levels,  Mariella decided to learn sign language and discovered that streaming content was inaccessible for deaf children. SignUp is a free Chrome browser extension that provides sign language interpretation alongside children’s films on Disney+ and Netflix videos. The company now has more than 20,000 weekly users.

Mariella, 19, who is the youngest person on the Forbes list, is studying at Stanford University in California while continuing to develop her company.  At her instigation, Rugby School now offers classes in British Sign Language as part of its co-curricular programme – 14 students have joined as well as 22 staff.

She was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours programme in their Gap Finders series – ‘the student who brought sign language to Disney+ and Netflix for the first time’ – on 19 October 2023.