The Short Life of Stringbike's EIC Accelerator Handbike

Stringbike Kft., a small Hungarian company that replaced the bicycle chain with a rope running over pulleys, was selected in the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, for STRINGHANDBIKE, a push-pull drive that clips onto a manual wheelchair. The EU contributed €1,132,818.75 to a €1,618,312.50 project that ran from 1 July 2019 to 31 October 2022, according to CORDIS. The company appears under its own name, with Felsőzsolca as its city, in the European Commission's list of SME Instrument Phase 2 winners.

Seven years later the company no longer exists. Hungarian register aggregators list it as "STRINGBIKE Korlátolt Felelősségű Társaság felszámolás alatt", the legal suffix for a company in liquidation, and ceginformacio.hu gives its status as "deleted from company register". OPTEN marks it "Megszűnt" (ceased) and says its register data stopped being in force on 26 August 2025. Its last filed accounts, for 2020, show net revenue of HUF 3,291,000, which ceginformacio.hu converts to €9,013.

A Company That Has Been Wound Up

The register entries agree on the end point but not on every detail. CompanyWall still shows the company as "Aktív, Felszámolás alatt" (active, in liquidation) and lists five owners, among them the state-backed Széchenyi Tőkebefektetési Alap, the private investor V3 Partners and Róbert Kohlhéb, a co-inventor of the string drive; ceginformacio.hu counts eight owners, reports zero employees as of 1 September 2025, and says 2020 is the only financial statement available. Céginfo.hu states "A cég megszűnt", the company has ceased. When the liquidation began, which court ordered it and who the liquidator was could not be verified from free sources: the official Hungarian register sits behind a captcha and the paid extracts were not bought for this article.

The public face of the business disappeared earlier. Archived copies of stringbike.com show the full range, including the "Dock push-pull for wheelchair", the "Slim for wheelchair" and the "Stringchair wheelchair kit", as late as August 2022. By February 2023 the domain carried a bicycle review blog with no link to the company, and it still does.

The Technology: Rowing Instead of Cranking

Most handbikes for wheelchair users are driven by a chain and hand cranks turned in a circle. Stringbike's drive pulls a synthetic rope off a pulley each time a lever moves, a mechanism the company first sold on bicycles. Wikipedia records that Stringbike Kft. presented what it calls the world's first commercial string-driven bicycle in Padova in 2010, and that Hungarian ultra-cyclist Ferenc Szőnyi rode a carbon Stringbike in the 2012 Race Across America, placing 14th. The company that won the EU grant is a later entity, registered in 2014. A 2016 profile by Economx put 2015 sales at 100 bicycles, 75 to 80% of them exported, against a 2016 target of 2,500.

The wheelchair version turns the drive into a rowing motion. In the STRINGHANDBIKE design described on CORDIS, an extra wheel is connected to a front-wheel adapter on the chair and the user pushes and pulls a handlebar; long or short arm strokes both move it. "There are some wheelchair users who cannot reach back with their arms to touch the wheel in the traditional manual wheelchair, but who would be able to use a lever in front of them," sales head József Kakas told the EU's Horizon Magazine in December 2021. The magazine reported that the lever reduces the load on shoulder joints compared with standard manual wheelchairs; no independent study of that claim was found.

The company's best-known user story shows how loosely its numbers travelled. Its own website said Ágota Terhes, an athlete with multiple sclerosis, improved her half-marathon time on a StringHandbike from 02:22:00 to 01:48:01; a 2019 interview in BC Magazin with business development director János Podonyi gave the change as 2 hours 20 minutes to 1 hour 40 minutes. The same interview described production since founding as "a few hundred" units.

What STRINGHANDBIKE Promised, and What the Record Shows

The grant built on a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study, also called STRINGBIKE, which ran from November 2016 to April 2017 and aimed to adapt the handbike for "women, children, the elderly and those who can use only one arm" before serial production, according to CORDIS. The Phase 2 objective was commercial. Stringbike said it had validated the device with 150 wheelchair users, planned a retail price of €1,700, estimated its worldwide potential at €50 million a year and would sell directly through local disability communities, starting in Austria with the disability organisation ÖZIV and a distribution partner, Maierhofer GmbH, in Klagenfurt.

CORDIS lists Stringbike Kft. as the only participant, with a net EU contribution equal to the full grant, so no linked third party received part of it. Some copies of the Commission's winner list print the words "Technologiak Kft." on a line next to the Stringbike row; in the Commission's May 2020 cumulative list those words are the end of the name of EL-CO TECH Elektromos Kommunikacios Technologiak Kft. of Gödöllő, the beneficiary of a separate project, RAID, for detecting bacterial infections in poultry.

The only result CORDIS publishes for STRINGHANDBIKE is a dissemination plan due in the third month. There is no periodic report, no results summary and no final report, so the project's own account of what it achieved is not public.

1. Wheelchair push-pull products on saleDeliveredDock, Slim and Stringchair kits listed on stringbike.com until 2022.
2. Medical device statusPartlyStringchair registered in the EU; StringHandbike registration "pending" in December 2021, per Horizon Magazine. No later news.
3. Austrian launch with MaierhoferNot verifiedNo public trace of sales in Austria was found.
4. Commercial scale-upNot achieved2020 revenue of HUF 3.291M; liquidation followed.
5. Public reportingMissingOnly a dissemination plan on CORDIS.

The Money

Before the EU grant, the company ran on Hungarian public venture capital. The Széchenyi Tőkealap, a state-owned fund manager, says its fund invested HUF 117.8 million in Stringbike in 2014 and another HUF 40 million in 2018 together with private co-investors, according to its 2018 portfolio note, which also lists Stringbike among the year's ten most interesting Hungarian innovations. Economx dated the entry of the Széchenyi fund and V3 Partners to 2015, a year later than the fund's own account. The SME Instrument award was grant only; no EIC equity was part of it.

Against roughly €1.18 million of EU grants and more than HUF 150 million of venture money, the one public revenue figure is small: HUF 3,291,000 in 2020, the second year of the EU project. No accounts for 2021 or later are listed by OPTEN or ceginformacio.hu, although the project ran until October 2022. How much of the EU grant was paid out, and whether any of it was recovered in the liquidation, is not public.

Why Europe Should Care

Mobility aids sit squarely within the EU's Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021-2030, which makes independent living and free movement for disabled people one of its pillars, as Alzheimer Europe also summarises. Stringbike's own figure of about 1.5 million manual wheelchair users in Europe, quoted on CORDIS, shows the market it was aiming at. The device was a mechanical add-on rather than a strategic technology, but it was the kind of European-made assistive product that the strategy wants to be affordable and available.

The Verdict

The company's former owners and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.