By will-buy
British startup WeWalk has raised about $4 million in just within month for its smart cane and voice assistant guide. WeWalk picked up nearly $2 million in a crowdfunding campaign quickly after landing a prestigious UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) grant for slightly more than $2 million.
Funding Walk
The WeWalk cane embeds a touchpad, speaker, and sensory tools within the handle of a standard white cane. A connected smartphone app adds a voice assistant that users can activate using the touchpad. The voice assistant can answer questions about in which the user is, nearby trains and buses spots, identify nearby buildings and landmarks, book an Uber, and supply real-time walking directions inside a form better suited to those with limited or no vision. The cane checks for waist-high obstacles with ultrasonics, vibrating when an echo suggests a possible hazard nearby.
The UKRI grant was area of the Healthy Ageing Challenge, some pot initiative with Innovate UK, Imperial College London and also the Royal National Institute of Blind. The organization considered the ecu equity crowdfunding platform Crowdcube for its next funding effort, quickly reaching the amount it first aimed at before ultimately hitting 300% from the initial goal with support from a lot more than 400 investors. That success isn't too surprising since WeWalk was created from the 2023 crowdfunding campaign. The company has since successfully completed Microsoft's AI for Accessibility program, adding Azure AI for speech recognition and related features.
“WeWALK's products are transforming the lives of visually impaired people across the world by dramatically improving their mobility. You want to scale our business to achieve a wider audience and further develop our technology so it may be used by other groups in society such as elderly people who also face mobility-related challenges,” WeWalk co-founder and chief product officer Kürsat Ceylan said. “The significant additional investment from institutional investors and additional financial support from more than 400 individual investors through our crowdfunding is adding to these ambitions by helping us develop new partnerships in key markets, including the UK where we intend to grow our sales and R&D functions.”
