What Vigil does
A smoke detector waits for smoke, which means it waits for a fire that has already started. Gill's device watches for the condition that precedes one: a heat source left unattended, a stove or a heater still running with nobody in the room. Thermal and standard cameras mounted on a wall feed the detection, and an alert arrives as a text message.
Entrepreneur reported the accuracy at 97%. Because the system is watching a room rather than sampling the air, it can be pointed at other questions too, and the article describes it recognising when children arrive home or identifying animals in a yard. The underlying capability is the same one: knowing what is in the frame and whether a person is with it.
Built with ChatGPT and Cursor
Gill taught herself to code, and she has been direct about the tools. She used ChatGPT and the AI coding tool Cursor to write and refine the software, and credits them with making the project possible by answering her specific questions rather than general ones.
Her description of the method is unglamorous. “I’ll just type it in a prompt, and then I’ll see, does that look right,” she told Entrepreneur. That loop, ask, inspect, correct, is how a great deal of software now gets written, and it has lowered the barrier for a teenager with a hardware idea more than any programming course has.
The $25,000 that came first
Before the company there was a competition. In 2023 Gill won the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge, a national American science competition for middle-school students, and $25,000 with it.
Both Amazon and Google have since backed the project, support that Entrepreneur describes as covering her AWS and Google Cloud infrastructure. That is a specific and practical kind of funding: a camera system that analyses video continuously runs up cloud computing bills long before it has customers, and cloud credits remove the cost that would otherwise stop a teenage founder outright.
Where the project stood in late 2025
Gill founded Vigil Inc. in 2025 and told Entrepreneur she was targeting mass production by the end of that year. A community in Arizona that had suffered repeated garage fires had asked to pilot the device, with testing expected within weeks of the article.
That is the last documented position. The sources used here do not record whether mass production began, how the Arizona pilot went, or what the company has done since October 2025. Nothing about her school, her family or her date of birth is stated beyond her age of 14 and her home city of San Jose.
Why the detection problem is hard
Fire detection has been dominated by one design for decades because it is cheap, needs no network and fails safe. Its weakness is well understood: the alarm depends on combustion products reaching the sensor, so an alarm in the hallway cannot warn anyone before a kitchen fire is already burning.
Watching a room with cameras inverts that trade-off, and creates new problems in exchange. The system must distinguish a pan left on a hob from the same pan being used, and it must do so reliably enough that people do not disable it, which is the fate of every alarm that cries wolf. A 97% accuracy figure is impressive for a prototype and still means a wrong call in three cases out of a hundred. That gap is what a pilot in real homes exists to measure, and it is why the Arizona test matters more to the project than the awards do.
| Person | Country | Milestone | Age / Stat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rishi Shiv Prasanna | India | Winning the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar in 2023 at eight, for… | Age 0 |
| Shanya Gill | United States | Vigil, a camera system that spots unattended heat sources | Age 11 |
| Cannan Huey-You | United States | Presenting research on a Milky Way gas cloud at the American Astronomical… | Age 11 |
| Ángela Olazarán Laureano | Mexico | An AI medical assistant built in Veracruz, designed to work where there is | Age 14 |
| Émer Hickey | Ireland | Co-winning the 2014 Google Science Fair grand prize | Age 16 |
What is documented — and what is not
✓ Documented
- Aged 14 in San Jose; built Vigil after a 2022 restaurant fire near her home (Entrepreneur)
- System uses thermal and standard cameras to detect unattended heat sources at a reported 97% accuracy (Entrepreneur)
- Won the 2023 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge and $25,000; backed by Amazon and Google (Entrepreneur)
? Unverified, disputed or wrong
- No date of birth, school or family details published
- No confirmation that mass production began or how the Arizona pilot performed
- The 97% accuracy figure is the company's, reported by Entrepreneur, not an independent test result
Questions people ask about Shanya Gill
How old is Shanya Gill?
Entrepreneur described her as 14 in October 2025, placing her birth around 2011. No date of birth is published.
What does Vigil do?
Wall-mounted thermal and ordinary cameras detect unattended heat sources and send a text alert, at a reported 97% accuracy.
Why did she invent it?
A restaurant fire near her San Jose home in 2022 led her to conclude that conventional smoke detectors react too slowly.
Did she use AI to build it?
Yes. She taught herself to code and used ChatGPT and the AI coding tool Cursor to develop and refine the device.
Who funds Vigil?
Entrepreneur reports backing from both Amazon and Google, supporting the AWS and Google Cloud infrastructure the system runs on.
What prize has Shanya Gill won?
She won the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge in 2023, which carried $25,000.
Is Vigil on sale?
As of October 2025 she was targeting mass production by the end of that year, with a pilot planned in an Arizona community. No later status appears in the sources used here.
Is Shanya Gill on Wikipedia?
No Wikipedia article on her was identified in the research behind this page.
Quick quiz: how well do you know Shanya’s story?
What prompted Shanya Gill to build Vigil?
What does the system watch for?
Which competition did she win in 2023?
Sources
- This 14-Year-Old's Business Could Save Your Life. ChatGPT Helped Her Build It. — Entrepreneur, 2025-10-02
Checked by the Geniuses.club editorial team. Ages are given as of September 2026.
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