For Timothy Balz, co-founder and CEO of Kalogon, a wheelchair technology startup, a stint at SpaceX wasn’t a dream job—it was a launchpad for a very different mission. “I went to SpaceX so that I could come back and disrupt the wheelchair industry,” Balz told Observer at this year’s SXSW. Balz was a build engineer for SpaceX’s Starship thermal protection system.
Balz’s commitment to mobility innovation goes back to his high school years, when he founded a nonprofit called Freedom Chairs to refurbish and donate power wheelchairs. The project began after he saw a fellow student stranded in a manual chair because his insurance wouldn’t cover a powered one. Balz responded by building a custom device for him.
“I traded a moped for a wheelchair on Craigslist, and I tricked it out for him,” said Balz. He added a sound system, leg rest, joystick adjustment and even a hitch to pull a recycling bin so the student could participate in the school’s recycling program.
Fifteen years later, the technology has come a long way—and so has Balz, now in his early 30s. During an internship at Intel, he developed the first connected wheelchair using the chipmaker’s technology, and it earned praise from none other than Stephen Hawking. In 2019, he launched Kalogon to develop smart seating systems designed to make wheelchair use more comfortable, reduce pressure injuries, and even assist seated professionals like pilots.
Kalogon’s technology adapts in real time to the user’s body shape and movement, automatically shifting pressure points to simulate the health benefits of standing. Its core offerings—the Orbiter Med and Orbiter for Aviation—are already being used in both clinical and commercial contexts. A connected app allows clinicians to fine-tune settings based on medical needs the device can’t automatically detect, such as amputations or pelvic imbalances. The system is powered by A.I., eliminating the need for manual adjustments and traditional air pumps.
Balz isn’t just refining the wheelchair—he’s redefining what’s possible for the people who use them. John Miller is an early user who suffered a debilitating pressure injury after a spinal cord injury. Previously confined to his chair for just a few hours each day, Kalogon’s technology extended his comfort window to 16 hours. The change gave him the time and energy to reconnect with his community, take a road trip to see his grandchildren, garden, cycle, return to physical therapy and begin relearning how to walk. He now walks with a cane.
“We didn’t make him able to walk again, but we did enable him to get back in his community and not only find his purpose, but create the time for him to be able to go do those activities that eventually led to him being able to walk again,” said Balz.
Investors are skeptical about disability tech
Despite the technology’s promise, Kalogon initially struggled to get traction with investors. “I couldn’t even get my foot in the door initially,” said Balz. The assumption was that wheelchair tech didn’t have mass-market potential, despite the fact that around 5.5 million Americans use wheelchairs.
“People are aging more, and they’re living longer because of technology. It’s becoming more and more evident that disability is a natural part of the human experience,” said Diego Mariscal, CEO and co-founder of 2Gether-International (2GI), the largest startup accelerator for disabled entrepreneurs, told Observer SXSW. As someone with cerebral palsy, Mariscal also calls himself “chief disabled person” of his company. (2GI is not an investor in Kalogon.)
Balz said he hopes Kalogon’s success will help shift investor mindsets. “When I can go back to them and say, ‘You lost out on a 10–20x return because of your biases,’ that feels pretty good,” he said, hinting at where Kalogon would be if it found a buyer today. “Now we’re giving an edge to all the other startups who have failed not because they didn’t have a market, not because they didn’t have a great product, but because of the bias.”
As mainstream companies like Apple and Meta roll out accessible consumer technologies, such as AirPods with clinical-grade hearing aids and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Mariscal sees reasons for both optimism and caution. Outside of what Balz calls the broken incentive structures of the U.S. health insurance system, which often fails to serve disabled individuals, Mariscal points to a more fundamental issue: representation.
“There’s a mantra that really runs through the disability rights movement, which is ‘nothing about us without us,’ which implies that if you’re making things for the disability community, we really should be thinking about the disability community at all levels,” said Mariscal.
Mariscal believes Kalogon’s innovation-first model—what he calls “the startup approach”—must work in tandem with long-term advocacy. His nonprofit accelerator currently supports 700 disabled entrepreneurs and is in the process of developing a first-of-its-kind venture capital fund focused on founders with disabilities. Even as DEI efforts face political backlash, Mariscal remains hopeful. “There have been monumental strides in the space, and you’re not putting the genie back in the bottle,” he said.
