Vail Horton ’02
Founder and CEO,
Keen Mobility

            The company he founded when he was a student now sells more than two million dollars’ worth of crutches, canes, wheelchair cushions, and mattresses per year. It employs seven University alumni. It delivers some 24,000 units annually to the elderly and handicapped and disabled of fifty states. It has raised more than $1.7 million in investment capital. It was invented one day in 1999, “when I’d been told by my doctors that I couldn’t use crutches anymore, and would have to use a wheelchair,” says Horton. “I asked some engineering friends to invent a shock-absorbing crutch, and they started thinking, and I walked into Engineering Hall one day and found an open office door, and explained my idea to a professor, and a week later there was an engineering project going. I was an entrepreneurship student, so I started a business plan, and then I walked into Swindells Hall, and biology professor Steve Kolmes found some physiology students for the project, and pretty soon there was Keen Mobility...

            “We want to revolutionize health care, pure and simple. We think innovation is the key to better health care, not insurance. Because insurance pays for everything there’s no motivation for innovation. But creative engineering is the key to opening the lives of the elderly and handicapped and disabled. We want to be the biggest durable medical goods company in the world, because we think our work changes the lives of the elderly and handicapped and disabled. If we can keep our passion going, we can do it.

            “I use our products, yes. I use our Navigator crutch. I used to wear out regular crutches in six months, but I haven’t worn these out at all and I am starting to worry that maybe we made them too well...”