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Settled by the promoter
Helping Hands Nuada
Portugal, PT
instalment
monthly
term
6 months
yearly interest
5%
risk rating
B-
Bridge loan for EU funded health tech startup.
Description
Nuada is a Portuguese tech startup that develops soft and intelligent exoskeletons. Their patented technology was first applied to the hand in order to create a system that looks like a normal glove, enabling its user to hold objects up to 40 kg with their hand completely relaxed. The idea has been successfully validated, there are people wanting to buy and Nuada is now preparing the industrialization phase. The electronic glove is safe, light, and small and was designed to be affordable and non-intrusive. By using thin, breathable, flexible, and smart textiles that are customizable, it’s a unique enhancement technology developed to be an everyday essential wearable that people forget they are wearing.
The funds raised through Goparity will be used as a bridge loan that will allow the promoter to continue its activity until it receives the intermediate payment from the European Union outright fund, predicted for December 2020.
The system was designed having in mind people suffering from any kind of hand or wrist musculoskeletal disease and/or acute pain. These symptoms affect several millions of people in the world due to multiple causes such as aging, arthritis, strokes, occupational diseases, among others.
From the company’s contacts with stakeholders, two other markets have emerged: labor-intensive industries with the use being mostly related to occupational disease prevention or productivity enhancement; and the sports sector, mainly to provide a tool for rehabilitation and performance improvement for amateur or handicapped sports practitioners.
The flagship product is composed of a glove, with bioinspired artificial tendons and multiple sensors, and a bracelet, comprising most of the electronics and connectivity. The proprietary software and sensor arrays provide automatic and intelligent interaction in order to achieve a seamless user experience. It also shares sensor data from the glove to a smartphone and a cloud-based server, which can then be accessed and analyzed by the user or a healthcare professional in a smartphone, PC, or tablet app in real-time or on-demand.
According to the World Health Organization, the proportion of older people requiring support from adults of working age will increase from 10,5% in 1955 and 12,3% in 1995 to 17,2% in 2025. Since elderly people have different healthcare requirements, health systems will need to adapt so they can provide adequate care and remain financially sustainable. According to the World Heart Foundation, there are 15 million new cases of stroke per year worldwide and 50 million people in the USA suffering from arthritis. Adding to this, repetitive-stress job injuries account for around 30% of doctor-diagnosed Musculoskeletal Disorders. These numbers represent an immense opportunity for service robots, such as the NUADA glove, to help compensate for the disability effects in the function of hand manipulation. It is a largely “unexploited territory” with developments happening simultaneously by few players and the promoter is clearly one of the front runners worldwide, due to its stage of development, functionalities, value-for-money, and expected time-to-market.
The Impact
- Improved quality of life for people with reduced hand mobility: by returning hand mobility to its users, the glove allows them to perform tasks that would be difficult or impossible to perform in a comfortable way.
- Inclusion of people with hand mobility problems: the glove has a significantly lower cost when compared to the existing systems on the market (25% of the price charged by SEM Glove and NASA/GM). By being more affordable, it is accessible to more people. On top of this, its aesthetics (beautiful and discrete) help avoid any potential discriminatory situations towards people with any hand disability.
- Improved healthcare: the real time data tracking that can be accessed and analysed by the user or a healthcare professional, will improve the health care provided by allowing for a more customized and holistic treatment.
Contribution to the Sustainable
Development Goals
Sustainable Development Goals
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Financial viability
- Several pilots and tests with established multinationals (in the automotive and hardware industry): from the more than 300 companies that asked for pilots, in January 2017 Nuada initiated pilots and on-site meetings with Volkswagen Group (Auto-Europa), Hilti (US and Portugal) and Comau (Italy). This allowed the company to create good traction, market validation, and the right awareness for their technology. In the near future, the company expects to add My Handspring (US Healthcare), Hospitals in Portugal, and Hospitals in the UK.
- More than 1.000 people registered in pre-sale: so far, the company has received over 1.000 inbound contacts without any type of marketing effort, from people wanting to buy the glove.
- Ready to approve exclusive distribution depending on annual minimum sales: secured Letters of Intent from distributors across Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, and the UAE. This model is easy to scale, leveraging on established sales channels; requires fewer resources (logistics and marketing) when compared to direct sales.
On top of this, the startup has secured an outright grant of € 1,7 M from the European Union.
Download Key Investment Information Sheet
Guarantees
Horizon 2020 grant from the European Commission (a payment of up to 687.750€ will be made to the company until December 2020), reserved to settle the loan.
The Promoter
About Nuada, LDA
NUADA is a Portuguese company created to assure the development and commercial exploitation of the NUADA glove - a new type of intelligent and soft exoskeletons. The company has received several awards over the years for its flagship product.
The NUADA team is comprised of multidisciplinary profiles which gives them an essential set of competencies to achieve their goals and milestones.
The company has 11 team members, including Carolina Amorim (Project Manager), Rita Faro (Regulatory Affairs), one bio-engineer, two software developers, and one electronic engineer. The team is also supported by a great group of advisors that have great experience in all fields of the project, from Product development, Hardware, manufacturing, Software, Textiles, Industry markets, funding, and Healthcare markets. They are leaders of big companies, University groups, and Venture capital structures that will ensure that the Nuada team will always have the input of experts for all foreseeable challenges.
Why this name - Nuada?
"Nuada" was, according to legend, the king of the Celtic gods. During a battle, he lost his hand and part of his arm, ceasing to be perfect and, therefore, losing the possibility of being king of the gods. Another god replaced Nuada, Bres, who was oppressing and made his subjects very unhappy. However, the god of healing Dian Cecht made the Nuada a fully functional hand made of silver, restoring him to perfection and the possibility of resuming his reign. Back on the throne, Nuada freed his people from oppression. The impact that, in this story, a physical characteristic of a single individual has on the entire population is quite interesting. Thus, the name of the main character, Nuada Silverhand, served as inspiration for the name of our system!
The idea for the glove came to Filipe after he fractured his hand in a Jiu-jitsu class. The inspiration was born from what he felt with this injury: he noticed that his reduced mobility had a lot of consequences on his everyday life and the recovery time until he gained full hand mobility was too long – about 11 months.
During this period, while he was finishing his PhD in Biomedicine, in Universidade da Beira Interior, he decided to create a prototype with the help of two teachers to participate on the tech competition Microsoft Imagine Cup. In 2014, the entrepreneur won the European version of the same contest and was one of the finalists on the world edition, to which were only selected 10 teams worldwide.
In 2015, he participated in Startup Braga. In that year, already holding a patent, he founded the company to make the prototype functional. After that, the product started to be developed with Portuguese partners.
The company was represented in UTEN, an acceleration program in Texas, United States.
In 2016/2017, they were selected for the HAX hardware accelerator program, winning an acceleration program of 4 months in Shenzhen, China. Also in 2017, they closed two investment rounds, one from an American company from Silicon Valley.
In 2018, they were the Portugal winners of the StartJLM competition promoted by Israel and we won the EUtop50 SME award, received in the European Parliament.
In 2019, Nuada secured financing of 1.7 million euros from the European Union for Research and Development.
Without marketing efforts, they have a list of more than 300 companies (such as ElectroLux, Siemens, Volkswagen, Airbus, Skoda Auto, among others) that tried to buy the glove or book pilots. Some of these companies transitioned into partner companies, mainly based on size, market, and distance to their headquarters.
They are now in the phase of partner expansion and pilot booking to make sure the prototypes and products translate well into the global market and avoid regional strange data points. The most important proof of concept is with Auto-Europa, a Volkswagen factory in Portugal, where they are testing and integrating new specs in order to fulfil their requirements. Their engineering, medical and ergonomic teams have been really committed to the project in order to be able to scale to all of the Volkswagen Group.
In the healthcare sector, the company has more than 1000 individual contacts to try to solve users’ disabilities, all aligned with their product features and knowing the current price point.
They have over 10 distributors on their partner waiting list, which will play a huge part in their market extension.
The team
Filipe Quinaz
He has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and is a Ph.D. student in Biomedicine
Vitor Crespo
He is a healthcare entrepreneur with strong executive management skills gathered in multinationals over the last 20 years. He has a very strong experience in company management, sales, fund-raising, and distribution.
Fernando Nogueira
An Electronic Engineer with two postgraduates in "Product Design" and "Industrial Management”. He has a vast professional experience in product development.
Business Model
According to the World Health Organization, the proportion of older people requiring support from adults of working age will increase from 10,5% in 1955 to 17,2% in 2025. Since elderly people have different healthcare requirements, health systems will need to adapt so they can provide adequate care and remain financially sustainable. According to the World Heart Foundation, there are 15 million new cases of stroke per year worldwide and 50 million people in the USA suffering from arthritis. Adding to this, repetitive-stress job injuries account for around 30% of doctor-diagnosed Musculoskeletal Disorders. These numbers represent an immense opportunity for service robots, such as the NUADA glove, to help compensate for the disability effects in the function of hand manipulation. It is a largely “unexploited territory” with developments happening simultaneously by few players and the promoter is clearly one of the front runners worldwide, due to its stage of development, functionalities, value-for-money, and expected time-to-market.
Nuada has applications in two big and different markets.
- Industry (B2B): the company’s beachhead market. With a simple regulatory path, the startup will be selling directly to big industries located in the US and Europe, starting with companies that are already on a pre-sale waiting list. The first sales will be used as market validation in order to accelerate the distributors and market awareness. In this segment, industry workers are the main users and factory directors are the decision-makers.
- Healthcare (B2B2C): after entering the Industry segment, certifications and processes will be ready for the healthcare market exploitation. In this segment, people with hand disabilities are the main users, and buyers can be the users themselves, their caretakers, or healthcare partners. The healthcare application will be distributed in healthcare centres to allow these organizations to manage the customer relationship, product fitting and maintenance front-end. In order to assure market growth, they are targeting healthcare facilities that are naturally in close contact with the end users/customers and specialized distributors in order to reach a bigger scale and geography. In the future, Nuada is considering online sales. But, in order to avoid unnecessary risks and to scale fast the approach will be through this installed channel.
In the future, their product could also be used by sports practitioners and/or physiotherapists, allowing them to understand if the exercise plan is being executed in the best way for example.
In 2018, the company won a Europen Union outright fund of 1,7 million euros under the pilot project Accelerator of the Innovation European Council (CEI).
Nuada’s revenue model has three different revenue streams:
- Device: the selling price of €1.500 includes a good margin for the distributor (this price might decrease when they get economies of scale).
- Glove Hardware annual maintenance fee: € 150 a year after the second year.
- Software Monthly Recurrent revenue: € 5 a month.
The company is competing with electromechanical gloves, an emerging market with two relevant competitors – SEM glove and NASA/GM glove. The NUADA glove is lighter, smaller, cheaper, and more intelligent, and more energy-efficient than these, which results in a better price-quality ratio, making the product highly competitive.
Active since
2015
Fiscal country
PT
Operating In
Portugal
Industry
Social Services
Number of Goparity Loans
3
Women Shareholders
No
Website
https://nuada.pt/Updates
2022-03-11
How Nuada's smart glove wants to empower those who have lost mobility in their hands
Filipe Quinaz, CEO of Nuada, told SAPO TEK, that the partnership with Goparity played a "crucial part" in its achievements. "More than the funding itself, which is important, it has allowed us to a...
Read more →2021-03-08
Project End
This project has successfully reached its payments plan's maturity. All investors have received the capital invested in its integrity, as well as the interest payments.
Nevertheless, the journey continues, and the project's impact will keep growing for many more years ahead.
2020-09-10
First payment
First instalment was paid to all the investors
2020-07-29
100% funded and new target of 150.000€
After raising 100.000 € in a little more than 48h, Nuada decided to increase the global investment amount of their campaign by 50.000€, to 150.000 €. The campaign deadline and all the other offer conditions will stay the same.
2020-07-17
Open for investment
2020-07-16
Project Photographs
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