Stephen Cluskey is a paraplegic and an optimist. 

When I ask him, quite bluntly, if Ireland is a good place to have a disability in, he is diplomatic. 

There are worse places, he says, places where he could be staring at a wall rather than leading a start-up, places in the world where he would be treated as a second-class citizen, or where he couldn’t move around as he does now. 

Cluskey had an accident when he was 18 years old which left him paralysed from the neck down. 

Twenty years later, he has now turned an idea for a taxi service for people with disabilities into Mobility Mojo, a scalable tech solution that some of the biggest companies in the world, including Google and CBRE, are piloting to ascertain out how accessible their buildings are and to make improvements. 

There are no universally accepted or mandated accessibility standards for new buildings, although most countries have their own. Ireland adheres to Part M building regulations that dictate that new buildings and extensions must be accessible by people with disabilities, but the guidance largely focuses on people with physical disabilities and very little detail is provided on meeting the needs of a wider range of people i.e those with visual or cognitive impairments.

What Mobility Mojo is now doing is offering a universally applicable accessibility score and report. This is something that multinationals can apply across all of the current and prospective buildings in their portfolio.

“We are potentially impacting almost every individual on this planet through their employee journey because, at some stage in their lives, everyone is affected by accessibility issues,” Cluskey said.

In the words of Patrick Hickey, the start-up’s executive chairman and lead investor to date, Cluskey is a gravitational force. Hickey came on board 12 months ago from Accenture, to who he sold Rothco, the creative agency he co-founded, in 2017.

Following Hickey’s hands-on arrival, Mobility Mojo shifted gears. It changed its focus from hospitality to workplaces and began thinking globally.

Over the course of an hour in the Guinness Enterprise Centre in the Liberties in Dublin, Cluskey and Hickey tag team to talk to The Currency about the business they are building and the need for it in a world which has functionally excluded many people with disabilities. Missing from the conversation is Noelle Daly, who co-founded the company with Cluskey. 

“The last one”

“If you think about it like this, we’ve had Me Too, we’ve had Black Lives Matter, and now this is the last one,” Hickey said, predicting a societal reckoning for inclusion and accessibility.

“We’re not there yet on either but we’re much further along. Things have been brought to a head, where now it’s not okay for somebody to say something or do something inappropriate. Disability and accessibility – actually being included – is the last one.”

Together with his wife, Hickey owns 24.32 per cent of the start-up. They are the third largest shareholders after Cluskey and his co-founder Noelle Daly, who own around 30 per cent each. Enterprise Ireland holds almost 7 per cent. 

Hickey has personal reasons for being attracted to investing in – and working with – Mobility Mojo.

“My 23-year-old daughter was born blind,” he said. “So I’ve been around the world of exclusion for a long time. My daughter entered the workforce this year, and because she mentioned her guide dog it made it really difficult for her to even get an interview.

“What I learned when I met Stephen was a lot of people with disabilities have had to fight for so much for so many years, that there’s a kind of underlying anger that can be around it. 

“We didn’t bring our daughter up like that. She doesn’t expect anything more than anybody else, she just wants the same type of opportunities. 

“But what I learned when I met Stephen is that it is about awareness, people just don’t understand. It’s not that somebody wouldn’t want to give somebody who has any level of disability a chance but they don’t know how they can do it.”

Ireland and other developed countries have a poor track record when it comes to employing people with disabilities and Mobility Mojo’s objective is to remove the accessibility barriers of workplaces so people with disabilities can be hired and can continue to work, the same as everyone else. 

The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) report published last year found 64 per cent of working-age disabled people are unemployed.

The ERSI reported that around 11 per cent of Ireland’s population experiences at least one disability and among the European Union’s 28 countries, Ireland had the fourth-lowest employment rate among people with disabilities of working age in 2018.

Right now, Mobility Mojo is working with clients including Diageo and Google and has strategic partnerships with the three largest facilities management companies in the world: ISS, Sodexo, and CBRE, along with the “biggest payments processor in the world”- which they won’t name. 

Products to cater to financial retail and manufacturing workplaces are also in the process of being finalised. 

Mobility Mojo has set its pricing structure at a flat fee of €25 per employee, charged annually. It is a deceptively low sum, as the companies they are targeting are some of the biggest by employee headcount in the world, with hundreds of buildings in their portfolio across many countries. 

Pace and scale

“There is no global accessibility standard right now, so we are aiming to create one,” Hickey said.

“Our challenge at the moment is pace and scale, we have to do it faster and bigger. We are not doing one building at a time, we don’t have the time or the patience.

“We are targeting very specific organisations with 100-plus physical spaces around the world. We figure if we get the top ten per cent at that scale, everybody else will follow.”

Last month, Mobility Mojo went public with a €‎7 million funding round target, but this has now been halved, on the advice of potential VC investors, and it is now aiming to be dominantly customer funded.

“We have a team of ten right now,” Cluskey said. “We want to increase headcount to 29 by the end of next year.

“We’re all stretched to our limits, which is where we want to be. But what the raise will help us do is expand that team quite a bit to be able to service and improve and go forward.”

Their platform, which building managers use to input data about their building and receive an accessibility score, can be used from the design stages of a building through to making retrospective changes.

This accessibility report and score are designed to be repeated annually, bringing in recurring revenue for the company.

Any suggestion of targeting hospitals or education settings is met with slight exasperation from Hickey, who sees the health service as already on its knee. Mobility Mojo’s objective, for now, he says, is to change the landscape of employment, while making money at the same time. 

Stephen Cluskey, chief executive of Mobility Mojo. Photo: Bryan Meade

The details

There is a misconception among some that an accessible building means a building that can cater to people using wheelchairs. 

But the reality, Cluskey explains is that 15 per cent of the global population have some kind of disability and a truly accessible building must be a functional space for people with both visible and “invisible” disabilities. 

This might include recalibration rooms for employees with sensory needs or a focus on the design of lighting and acoustics for people with visual or hearing impairments.

It is the focus on the minor details that makes a building fully inclusive, like using door handles rather than knobs for people with dexterity issues and choosing specific floor and wall finishes and colours for people with cognitive or visual impairment. 

Cluskey gives the example of one of the smartest buildings in the world, which was recently developed but when Mobility Mojo did their evaluation, it got a dismal score, accessibility-wise.

One thing that stood out was the elevators – they were brand new but they didn’t have voice announcements and for someone with a visual impairment, they wouldn’t know what floor they were arriving at, he said.

Porous

As I walked back through town to The Currency offices, I thought about what Cluskey had said, about being lucky to live in Ireland and to be able to do the work he is doing now, it occurred to me just how little we acknowledge that the line between those who live with a disability and those who don’t, is impermanent and porous. 

Millions of people, who could work and want to work, are locked out of whole parts of society because buildings and spaces are inflexibly designed for those without any disability or impairment.

Mobility Mojo’s aim to bring forward conversation and action on what is accessible and what is acceptable for a modern building will be interesting to watch.