Educators • Engineers • Advocates

Meet the Team Behind Zip Solutions

We are a collective of educators and software engineers committed to building a more accessible world. We believe assistive technology should be private, robust, and universally available.

Our Foundation

What Drives Everything We Build

Universal Dignity & Access

Essential communication tools should never be locked behind steep subscription walls. We ensure our primary live captions remain 100% free forever.

Strict Privacy by Design

No audio recording, no personal telemetry mining, and no selling student or client data. Audio processing happens on your device or via secure, encrypted channels.

Classroom & Real-World Proven

Every feature we design is guided by active educators, certified teachers of the deaf, and people with lived hearing loss experiences.

Leadership & Specialists

Passionate professionals bridging educational pedagogy, software architecture, and auditory accessibility.

Chris Webb

CEO & Co-Founder

Quebec, Canada

• Google for Education Certified Trainer & Innovator
• GEG Leader & Champions Ambassador
• Certified Educator (L1/L2) & Gemini Certified
• K-13 Computer Science

Chris is a High School Teacher born in the UK, with rich experience teaching in both the UK and Canada across Kindergarten to Grade 13. With a background in Computer Science, Chris is relentlessly focused on integrating meaningful technology into classrooms and designing practical solutions that empower every student to participate fully.

A Google for Education Certified Trainer, Certified Innovator, GEG Leader, and Champions Ambassador, Chris regularly speaks at educational technology symposiums and conferences. Certified in Google for Education Gemini and Educator Levels 1 & 2, he delivers practical professional development for teachers and administrators on meaningful classroom tech. He has presented directly to the Ministry of Education on practical classroom accommodations for students with hearing loss, and his work was the focus of the Google for Education Global Accessibility Day feature.

Chris was the driving inspiration behind Zip Captions through an innovation project with Dell Education Canada. After working closely with members of the d/Deaf community and teaching students who struggled with existing rigid tools, Chris recognized the urgent need for a free, dignified, browser-based live captioning solution. Chris lives in Quebec with his family and three cats.

James Petersen

CTO & Co-Founder

Quebec, Canada

• Google for Education Certified Innovator
• Cloud Architect & Former Educator
• Open Source Advocate

James is a Google for Education Certified Innovator and full-stack software engineer with over a decade of cloud development expertise. As a former teacher, James brings a unique pedagogical lens to software architecture, passionately believing that technology should empower learners to freely discover, analyze, and use information without friction.

James is an unyielding champion of open-source software, decentralized tools, and user privacy, viewing genuine community-building as the true strength of the modern web. He architects the high-performance real-time data pipelines and zero-install browser engines that power Zip Captions, EasySpeak, and our suite of assistive browser extensions.

When he isn't shipping updates for Zip Solutions, James spends his free hours tinkering with home automation and IoT hardware—typically involving 3D printing and blinking LEDs. An avid outdoorsman, he enjoys walking his dog through the fields of rural Quebec, canoeing Canada's scenic lakes, and tackling hands-on carpentry projects.

Guiding Our Vision

Guided by Our Advisory Board

Our advisory board brings together certified educators of the deaf, community leaders, and advocates with lived experiences who shape our product roadmap with empathy and rigor.

Meet the Advisory Board