For Kalogon co-founder and CEO Timothy Balz, a wheelchair technology startup, SpaceX’s appointment wasn’t a dream job — it’s a launch pad for very different tasks. Barz told Observer On this year’s SXSW. Balz is a construction engineer at SpaceX’s Starship thermal protection system.
Buzz’s commitment to mobile innovation goes back to his high school days when he founded a nonprofit called “Freedom Chair” to renovate and donate wheelchairs. The program began after he saw a classmate stranded in a manual chair because his insurance would not cover a powered chair. Balz responded to building custom equipment for him.
“I changed my mop and wheelchair on Craigslist, and I cheated on it for him,” Balz said. He added a sound system, leg rest, joystick adjustments, and even a hitchhike to pull back the recycling bin so students can participate in the school’s recycling program.
Fifteen years later, the technology has come a long way, and so is Balz, who is also in his 30s. During his internship at Intel, he developed the first connected wheelchair Use chipmaker’s technology and received praise from Stephen Hawking. In 2019, he launched Kalogon to develop smart seating systems designed to make wheelchairs more comfortable to use, reduce stress injuries, and even assist sitting professionals such as pilots.
Kalogon’s technology adapts to the user’s body shape and movement in real time, automatically transferring pressure points to simulate the health benefits of standing. Its core products – orbital drugs and aviation orbitals – have been used in clinical and commercial settings. The connected app allows clinicians to fine-tune the settings based on medical needs, which the device cannot automatically detect, such as amputation or pelvic imbalance. The system is powered by AI, eliminating the need for manual adjustments and traditional air pumps.
Not only did Balz refine wheelchairs, but he also redefined the possibility of people using them. John Miller is an early user who suffered debilitating stress injuries after spinal cord injury. Kalogon’s technology was previously limited to his chair for a few hours, expanding his comfortable window to 16 hours. This change gave him the time and energy to reconnect with the community, take a road trip to see his grandson, the garden, ride a bike, return to physical therapy, and then start learning how to walk again. He is walking with a cane now.
“We didn’t enable him to walk again, but we did enable him to go back to the community and not only find his purpose, but also create time for him to do activities that ultimately lead to him being able to walk again.”
Investors are skeptical about technology with disabilities
Despite the promising technology, Kalogon was initially struggling to attract investors. “Initially, I couldn’t even step into the way,” Balz said. Assume that wheelchair technology has no mass market potential, although about 5.5 million Americans use wheelchairs.
“People are aging, and because of the longer lifespan of technology. The biggest is Diego Mariscal, CEO and co-founder of 2Gether-International (2GI), a startup accelerator for entrepreneurs with disabilities, told Observer SXSW. As a person with cerebral palsy, Mariscal also calls himself a “primary disabled person” of the company. (2GI is not an investor in Kalogon.)
Buzz said he hopes Carrogon’s success will help change the way investors think. “When I can go back to them and say, ‘When you have bias, you lose with 10-20 times the return, that feels good,” he said. “Now, we offer an advantage to all the other startups that fail, not because they don’t have a market, not because they don’t have a great product, but because they don’t have a great product.”
With mainstream companies like Apple and Meta launching accessible consumer technologies such as Airpods and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses with clinical-grade hearing aids, Mariscal believes it is a reason for optimism and caution. Apart from what Barz said the disruption of the incentive structure of the American health insurance system, which is often unable to serve people with disabilities, Mariscal points to a more fundamental problem: representation.
Mariscal said: “There is a mantra that does run through the Disabled Rights movement, and it’s ‘no us’ for us’ nothing is us, which means that if you’re doing things for the disabled community, we really should consider the disabled community at all levels.”
Mariscal believes Kalogon’s innovation-first model (what he calls the “start approach”) must work in conjunction with long-term advocacy. His nonprofit accelerator currently supports 700 disabled entrepreneurs and is developing a major venture capital fund that focuses on the founders of people with disabilities. Even as DEI efforts face a political rebound, Mariscal remains hopeful. “The space has made great progress and you won’t put the elves back into the bottle,” he said.
