Sunil Khandbahale


Sunil Shivaji Khandbahale is a MIT Sloan Fellow, Innovator and Entrepreneur from Nashik, India. He is best known as a founder and CEO of KHANDBAHALE.COM, a free multilingual digital dictionary and translation platform for 23 languages, with a vocabulary of 10 million words and phrases.

Early life and education

Khandbahale was born in Nashik. He could not afford to enroll at a computer training institute after graduating high school, and so borrowed books and computer from his friend and taught himself programming.

Career

Khandbahale developed a dictionary search engine program for Marathi. He continued compiling dictionaries, and in 2005, set up an online dictionary portal, khandbahale.com, for various Indian languages. He is Sloan Fellow and earned a masters in business management MBA degree at MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2012, he launched 12 Language Dictionary on 12 December 2012 at 12 hours, 12 minutes and 12 seconds. In early 2013 Khandbahale launched his twelve-languages dictionary on an SMS platform. His Languages Apps are also available on the Android platform.
He also founded KHANDBAHALE.ORG, an organization which develops language-related projects such as Global Language Networking, Global Language Heritage, Global Language Friendship, Global Language Environment. He is a founder and secretary of the Global Prosperity Foundation, an NGO that focused on education, health and environment. In 2013 he was given an award as a youth icon by the Maharashtra Times. On 27 December 2013, he co-founded Kumbhathon with MIT Professor Ramesh Raskar, an innovation platform to spot problems and probe solutions in Nashik. In 2014, in conjunction with Mumbai University, he started developing an English to Sanskrit thesaurus for use with mobile phones.

Awards