THE Glasgow entrepreneur behind the Freedom One wheelchair has launched a funding round that should see the chair ready to hit the market by the end of this year.
Alex Papanikolaou, who has athetoid cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair on a daily basis, founded Freedom One Life in 2013 after finding that traditional power chairs fell short for anyone looking to live an active life. In particular, the life of their batteries and tyres was too short.
Having overseen the production of a prototype, which he has been using for the past year, he has now turned to Johnston Carmichael corporate finance director Lyn Calder to help raise £1.2 million to be used to complete the research and development of the chair.
He has also brought on board Albert Nicholl, who previously worked for medical device companies including Orthofix and Stryker, as managing director.
Mr Papanikolaou said that while the company has got to this stage with £350,000 of grant funding, with Scottish Enterprise being a particular supporter of the business, more cash is needed to get it to the next stage.
Mr Nicholl added that the £1.2m, which is expected to come from a mixture of private equity and angel investors, would take the business “through the final R&D stage to the escalation of the customer service piece to getting a market-ready chair”.
“We’ve put our business plan out to various angel syndicates with the help of Johnston Carmichael,” Mr Nicholl said.
“We’re in fairly extensive discussions with one group, who are at the end of their due diligence, and we’re waiting for financial term sheets.
“We’re also in discussions with another group who are very interested. The people who run the fund are on board with us – we’ve had three or four meetings with them.
“We’ve also had interest coming in from social impact funds. For them it’s not all about return - they believe they can help us.”
Mr Papanikolaou, who has covered more than 2,000 kilometres in the Freedom One prototype chair, said that as he has given it a “really good road test” the next stage is to move to user trials.
“From March it will go to ten people for user testing,” he said, adding that any modifications that are required after that will be made before the chair is sent for crash testing.
The chair will go into commercial production by the end of the year, with the company doing a deal with a manufacturer in Glenrothes that will produce the first chairs as and when orders come in. It also has the capacity to handle much larger production runs.
While the chair itself differs to those that are currently on the market in that it is lighter and has longer-lasting batteries and tyres, Mr Papanikolaou said another key differentiator of Freedom One Life will be its customer service.
Having come up with the idea for the chair while travelling the world, he said it was when he came back to Scotland that he realised just how unsupported power wheelchair users are in the UK.
“I really enjoyed travelling but everywhere I went I had to take a big heavy chair with me – I had to rely on it to do everything I wanted to do,” he said.
“The chair itself wasn’t designed to support someone as active as me who is out all day, seven days a week.
“Then when I came back to Scotland I was quite frustrated with the chairs and how unsupported they were.”
Noting that it is not unusual for wheelchair users to have to wait two weeks for a part if their chair breaks down, leaving them housebound, Mr Papanikolaou said customer service will be the most important part of Freedom One Life once it starts selling its chairs.
“At the moment if you buy a wheelchair you can’t contact the manufacturer,” he said. “You won’t have that with Freedom One Life.”
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