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Atlanta, GA | Posted: January 8, 2015
Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience
Summary Sentence:
Better Walk founder on Forbes' 30-under-30 list
Full Summary:
Better Walk founder on Forbes' 30-under-30 list
Partha and PrezPartha Unnava had no idea he’d made this year’s Forbes magazine list of ’30 Under 30 Who Are Moving the World,’ not until he logged into his Twitter account.
“Somebody tweeted about it, a friend who made the list last year. That’s how I found out,” says Unnava, who started a company, Better Walk, while a student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “It came entirely out of the blue, definitely a good surprise to start a Monday.”
Forbes magazine released its fourth annual list of 30-under-30, what the magazine calls, “today’s greatest gathering of young game changers, movers and makers.” This year’s edition features 600 millennials in 20 different fields – 30-under-30 in each, and Unnava made the cut in the Manufacturing division.
The timing and the division are appropriate, because the product Unnava developed while at Georgia Tech, the Better Walk crutch (the reason he is on the list), is about to go into small-run production. Unnava was a student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering when he developed the crutch after breaking his ankle playing basketball. He spent six weeks on a crutch.
“It was the worst thing ever, the worst six weeks of my life,” he says. “Over the next year I bounced around Georgia Tech talking about the idea.”
The idea was to create a crutch that allowed users to rest in a manner that didn’t put uncomfortable pressure on the armpits. So, along with his fellow biomedical engineering students, Frankie Swindell and Andrew Varghese, he started Better Walk, and the response has been staggering – they even presented their product to President Barack Obama. Better Walk was also accepted into the Zero To 510 Medical Device Accelerator program in Memphis, Tennessee, Tennessee, where it raised early venture funding.
“We were very fortunate. That validated us as a company, rather than a group of students with a project,” says Unnava, who left Tech after last spring semester to focus on being CEO of Better Walk and growing the company. “We’re getting ready to do a small run to get it into hospitals and scale up form there later this spring. It’s pretty exciting times for us.”
