Who is Danny Manu?
The British-Ghanaian Tech Visionary Breaking Language Barriers – One Earbud at a Time
By all accounts, Danny Manu shouldn’t be here.
Not in the halls of global tech recognition. Not on Forbes’ radar. And certainly not as the mind behind one of the most groundbreaking communication tools in the world today: earbuds that translate languages in real time – without needing internet.
Born in the UK to Ghanaian immigrants, Manu didn’t inherit wealth, access or the luxury of connections. What he did have was relentless curiosity and a belief that language, the oldest form of connection, shouldn’t be a limitation in the 21st century.
In an industry that often sidelines Black innovators, Manu carved his own lane, literally. While working as an engineer in aerospace and telecommunications, he quietly began developing a solution to a global problem: how to communicate across borders in an increasingly connected, but divided world.
The answer? CLIK, a pair of sleek, wireless earbuds built under his tech company Mymanu, founded in Manchester in 2014. These weren’t your typical consumer audio accessories. They were designed to listen, translate, and speak up to 40 languages, live.
No phone. No Wi-Fi. Just you, your earbuds, and the world.
It sounds like science fiction, but it’s real and it works.
The idea first took root when Manu watched his daughter struggle to communicate during a family trip abroad. He realised that for many people, immigrants, aid workers, tourists, business travellers – language was more than a barrier. It was a source of fear, frustration, even exclusion. What if you could simply hear someone in one language and understand them in yours?
With zero external investment, Manu poured his savings into R&D. He launched a crowdfunding campaign and worked nights to code, design, and manufacture what would become Mymanu CLIK. At CES in Las Vegas, the world took notice. Reviewers called it “the future of conversation.” Customers called it life-changing.
But that was just the start.
In 2023, he launched CLIK Pro, a next-generation model with eSIM technology and AI capabilities, enabling live voice translation without even needing a paired phone. It was a bold step into “screenless tech” – a field Manu believes is the future of mobile computing.
His vision isn’t to build earbuds. It’s to break global communication down to something as effortless as breathing. “The goal,” he mentioned, “is for you to travel anywhere in the world and speak to anyone, without even thinking about it.”
Manu’s company has since rolled out the MyJuno app, a companion tool for written and audio translations in over 37 languages. He’s also integrating indigenous and African languages – Ga, Yoruba, Swahili – into the product ecosystem, ensuring the innovation reflects the diversity of the people it serves.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he pivoted with uncanny instinct, launching Medybird, a healthcare initiative that delivered over 2 million units of PPE across Europe and Africa. For him, impact isn’t a byproduct of success, it’s the purpose.
Today, Danny Manu remains the rare breed of tech founder who isn’t just building hardware, but rewriting how we relate to each other. Quietly, deliberately, and with no hype machine behind him, he is disrupting the tech industry not with buzzwords, but with tools that speak for themselves—literally.
So, who is Danny Manu?
He’s the engineer who saw beyond code. The founder who taught earbuds to speak languages. The father who turned a moment of helplessness into a global solution.
And he’s just getting started.
