SwissLeg wins two awards

At award ceremonies the jury often stresses how hard it was to select a winner. This was different at the ceremony of the Seif Awards on Wednesday. All Jury members agreed that the only possible winner is SwissLeg. And the jury of the Seif Awards was in good company. On Tuesday SwissLeg has just won Venture Kick Phase III. The SEIF Award is worth CHF 10’000, Venture Kick Phase III CHF 100’000.

The start-up from Ticino can make good use of the money. Swissleg is evolving fast. In June the company signed a first contract with the International Organization for Migration. Before that SwissLeg has opened a first orthopaedic centre in Irbid (North Jordan). It is a manufacturing and training centre where patients who lost a leg for example in the Syrian conflict receive a prosthetic leg and learnt to walk and even run again. SwissLeg is planning to open twelve such facilities in the next five years.

Thanks to an innovative prosthetic design and a simple manufacturing process with low-cost and readily available materials, SwissLeg can produce and sell comfortably fitted below-knee and above-knee prosthetic legs at the lowest cost in its category yet comparable to high-cost products. Until now tens of millions of amputees in the developing world didn’t have access to prosthesis because available products were unaffordable or of such a low quality that renders them useless. This wasn’t only a tragedy for the individuals concerned it also caused massive economic losses.

The second amazing feature of the SwissLeg product is its flexibility. The simple sequential process, from patient evaluation to final fitting, takes only three hours, allowing patients to literally walk out of the workshop the same day.

SwissLeg was founded in 2012 by Roberto Agosta (CEO), Paulo Gonçalves (COO) and Mohammad Ismail (CTO). Ismailis the designer and inventor of the SwissLeg technology. He is a professional Ortho-Prosthetist with over twenty years of experience and a former employee for the International Commission of the Red Cross (ICRC). Besides the website the company has a very interesting Facebook page.