We’re a small team that dreams very big.
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Born in Portugal, Joe Duarte got his first hearing aid at the age of 4. He realized early on that he couldn’t use the phone like everyone else. After moving to the U.S. for high school and earning a bachelor's degree in biomedical electrical engineering, Joe began his career as a systems engineer at IBM and later started his own accessibility solutions company. He was always in search of an accessible phone platform, but he never found one that truly met his needs.
Meanwhile, Joseph Lee first immigrated from Korea to the U.S. in 1989 while working for Samsung. He then went on to learn the mobile and telecommunications industries at companies like Qualcomm and Pantech. In 2007, after reading that about 10% of the U.S. population had some form of hearing loss, Joseph founded InnoCaption to help these people in need, working with a team of engineers to develop the underlying technology for a groundbreaking real-time call captioning application.
Joe and Joseph met at a conference, and Joe asked for a demo. He called his daughter — and for the first time in his life, he had a normal phone conversation. He was blown away.
Soon, Joe joined Joseph as co-owner and co-CEO at InnoCaption to help share this budding technology with the deaf and hard of hearing community. More members of the Lee and Duarte families joined the team along the way, with the company as a whole becoming an extended family unified by our mission. Today, InnoCaption is a leader in the call captioning industry, with over 10,000 5-star reviews.
But the world is full of accessibility challenges to solve. With Mezmo Technologies, co-owned by the Lee and Duarte families, we’re finding innovative ways to solve them.
I spent the first decade of my career in finance and investing before joining the InnoCaption team to help grow the business from a small bootstrapped operation into something built to last. Along the way, I saw what happens when technology is built by people who truly understand a problem and have a passion for helping others.
We’ve built InnoCaption into a company that serves tens of thousands of people with hearing loss every day. Now, we want to reinvest for the future.
My role as CEO of Mezmo Technologies is simple: to be a good steward of what our families have built and put those resources to work for others. That means developing new accessibility products and backing other founders on a mission like our own. We're not backed by venture capital. We're backed by two immigrant families who built something real, and we intend to keep building that way — with patience, purpose, and a deep sense of responsibility to the communities we serve.
Paul Lee, CEO
Joe Duarte is co-CEO of InnoCaption, where he sets the vision for the company with Joseph Lee while acting as a staunch advocate for the deaf and hard of hearing community. He joined InnoCaption in 2016, using his 25 years of experience in accessibility technology and decade in engineering at IBM to help launch the mobile app. Joe got his first hearing aid at 4 and his first cochlear implant in 2008.
Joseph Lee is the founder and co-CEO of InnoCaption. A veteran of the Republic of Korea Army, Joseph joined Samsung in 1983 and moved to the United States in 1989 as an expat, working in various roles and divisions within the company before building further expertise in telecommunications at Pantech. He founded InnoCaption in 2007 and continues to devote his time to making a difference for users.
Paul Lee is the CEO of Mezmo Technologies and the Chief Operating Officer of InnoCaption. He spent the first 12 years of his career in the finance and investment industry, working with Merrill Lynch, FFL, and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. After acting as a financial advisor to the company for years, Paul officially joined InnoCaption in 2020, where he now leads product development strategy.
