In an era where content is king but accessibility is too often an afterthought, Sunflower AI is thoughtfully and powerfully transforming how we experience video and live events, ensuring no one gets left out of the conversation.
What started as a fix for clunky YouTube captions has evolved into a powerful AI-driven solution bringing real-time, accurate captioning to events, conferences, and online experiences across Australia and beyond.
We caught up with Co-Founder and CEO Chuhao Liu to hear how Sunflower’s mission has grown, the human stories that continue to shape their work, and why accessibility isn't just a feature - it’s a fundamental part of good design.
In a few words, can you introduce yourself and your role at Sunflower AI?
My name is Chuhao Liu and I am the co-founder and CEO of Sunflower AI, a Sydney-based startup revolutionising live event accessibility with AI-powered captioning and translation in 78 languages.
What problem/s are you solving?
Language barrier to non native English speakers attendees and event accessibility to hearing impaired audience.
What does a typical day look like for you?
Send toddlers to childcare in the morning around 8am, walk for 30 mins to reflect on what is on my to do list. Bring my laptop to work in my favourite water front cafe until 12 pm. I usually do some coding in the morning and come back home to have lunch with my wife/cofounder. We share our progress and learning at lunch. In the afternoon, I'll make phone calls to users to collect feedback or follow up on prospects to push deals through the pipeline. Pick up kids at 5:30 pm. Feed kids and take them to bed around 7:30pm. Do some extra work or enjoy some personal relaxing time from 8 pm to 10 pm. Laying down on bed to listen some inspirational founder story and go to sleep, visioning the day we changed the world.
What unique challenges have you faced while in your current role and how did you overcome them?
As a startup CEO, I am always learning - like should I trust in my gut feeling on which direction to go or pivot for our startup to survive the AI race. Basically, lots of self learning and accepting failures and critics from reality and others like advisors, investors.
Live captioning is a technical challenge, but also a human one. What have you learned about people, communication, or connection through building this product?
People want our product to exist because they want and believe in the vision of events being more inclusive and everyone being more connected. In several pitch competitions, we are actually less competitive than other companies revenue-wise. The judges still selected us because of the vision we described. Some clients even chose to decline bulk pricing and insisted on paying full price to support us, which has been encouraging. What we have learned from people is: are your products making the world better?
What technology (AI or otherwise) are you most excited about becoming mainstream in the next few years - especially in the accessibility or live-event space?
We believe translation is the next big thing. Thanks to advances in speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and large language models like ChatGPT, it’s now possible to deliver real-time, natural-sounding translations at a fraction of the cost of human interpreters. Imagine attending any local event—whether it's a church service, a conference, or a community gathering—and instantly hearing everything speaking in your own language with just your phone and a pair of AirPods. That’s the future we’re building. We want to bring AI voice translation to every corner of society: from churches to conferences, libraries to the Olympics. Our goal is to make live translation accessible so that no one is ever left out because of language.
If you could go back to the very beginning of this journey, what advice would you give yourself?
It's not an overnight success. Just start.
Share a quote or mantra that motivates and resonates with you.
"Live everyday as your last day. Someday it will be true." It is a quote from Steve Job's Stanford graduation speech. Any time when I feel afraid of risk, I remind myself life is limited and don't waste life. Do what we want to do from the heart and trust society won't let us die because of poverty.
