A West Chester firm led by the creator of the SkyCam is looking to raise $4 million and upend the wheelchair and walker industry with its new invention.
The company, which has a $25 million valuation, has quietly raised over $160,000 toward its $4 million Series B goal for which it is currently seeking investors. Exokinetics expects to close the round in the first quarter of 2023.
The Zeen, the latest product from Exokinetics, is an alternative to a wheelchair and a walker, and falls somewhere between the two. It can manually boost someone from a sitting position to a standing one without a battery or motorization. It can also provide support for a person who would rather be on their feet than sitting.
Exokinetics is helmed by Garret Brown, who holds over 100 patents and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2013. The Haverford High School alum is behind inventions such as the Steadicam, which was used to shoot training sequences — including the iconic run up the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps — in the Rocky films. Brown also invented the SkyCam, a camera that slides across a suspended cable above the fields at NFL stadiums, including at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia.
Though the Zeen — the name is an homage to an early form of the bicycle invented by Baron von Drais in 1816 — may seem unrelated to Exokinetics' camera-steadying technologies, COO Ryan Meers said it shares a similar quality to most of Brown's inventions: lifting things.
"We spent five years developing [the Zeen] so that it has a really natural feel when it's lifting people from that seated position to a standing position," Meers said. "So lifting technology is really our core and we envision applying that in a variety of different products in the future, whether it be for static chairs or for cars or bathrooms."
The Zeen is priced at $3,800 and Exokinetics has sold over 100 so far. One of those was to a woman who used the Zeen to dance at her son's wedding, something she wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.
"She wasn't able to use any other device, but this allowed her to stand up and get close enough to her son to dance. So it can be very powerful, emotional," Meers said.
The company, which currently consists of a team of eight people, plans to use the funding to scale substantially, Meers said. The goal is to hire marketing and sales teams to help increase public awareness of the Zeen. He also said that it will help them order higher quantities of the parts required to assemble the Zeen, ultimately driving down the cost.
Much of the Zeen sales thus far have been at trade shows or online, but the goal is to have the product more widely available through resale or distributors.
The Zeen was originally geared toward the elderly population and those at risk of falling, but has since gained traction from those with chronic conditions such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, cerebral palsy or general ataxia, Meers said.
Additional iterations of the Zeen geared toward stroke survivors or those looking to play sports may be forthcoming.
The device, Meers added, allows users to "keep the active lifestyle that they had before. It's allowing them to go places. It's lightweight and foldable, which allows them to take it places and get out there still without feeling nervous of falling."
