In 2019 Freedom One Life joined the SOLIDWORKS Startups Program. Freedom One Life are disrupting the powered wheelchair market with the Series 5. The journey designing the Series 5 required the use of SOLIDWORKS to create concepts, validate designs and finally design parts and assemblies for manufacture. By the end of 2019 they had a working prototype. Now with medical device testing underway, Freedom One Life are on track to manufacture and supply the Freedom One Life Series 5.
Learn how the SOLIDWORKS Startups Program helped Freedom One Life from design to development.
“When we were ready to acquire CAD for the business SOLIDWORKS was my CAD software of choice. I was familiar with SOLIDWORKS capabilities from previous roles and contacted TMS CADCentre. I was delighted when they explained that as a start-up, we could benefit from the SOLIDWORKS Startups Program. Having free CAD for the first year is a huge benefit to a start-up business and the features in SOLIDWORKS are the best for engineering. CAD as good as SOLIDWORKS is a big investment and when you’re working off investors’ money you must maximise every pound spent. With SOLIDWORKS you can design, test using FEA (Finite Element Analysis), and visualise using the rendering package - it’s a handy set of tools to have. This saved us money and helped us have confidence going into testing because we’d tested everything using SOLIDWORKS Simulation first. We also used SOLIDWORKS Composer to design the illustrations and layout of the product manual.
I would absolutely recommend SOLIDWORKS Startups Program to other entrepreneurs. It’s great the support you can get from both SOLIDWORKS and TMS CADCentre and it’s a really good way to invest in start-ups. The first year is always difficult and to have access to SOLIDWORKS makes a real difference. I’ve told everyone I know and work with about the SOLIDWORKS Startups Program and how good the benefits are.”
Scott Savage, Technical Director.
