The AriHelder Origin Story — by Christian Barmen & Arjen Helder
Arjen and I first met around 2010, in a small fishing village in Xiamen, China. We were introduced through a mutual friend, and before we ever worked together, we were just neighbors. We hung out. We learned together. We tried to figure out how things worked — not just products, but the world.
At the time, Arjen was doing quality control and design work across Chinese factories. I was in trading. We were both "making things" people, and we helped each other out when we could.
The first time we actually collaborated was on a switch mode power supply for a small Norwegian electronics product. Nothing glamorous. But it worked, and it proved something: we complemented each other. Arjen is a deep technical thinker — an electronics engineer who started his career repairing consumer electronics in Holland, then moved to repairing avionics at the airport, then spent 15 years in Chinese manufacturing. I'm the business and logistics guy — the one who ended up with "Supply Chain" as a literal middle name after we were shipping a container a day from a Chinese factory.
The SunBell became the first solar lantern ever adopted as a UNHCR core relief item, distributed to refugee camps worldwide. When the Syrian refugee crisis escalated in 2014–2015, demand surged. We were shipping a container a day from our manufacturing partner E-Calling Electronics in Xiamen. Over 4 million SunBell units have been distributed to date. It was our first real mass-production project together.
The Moment That Changed Everything
The SunBell was designed for refugee camps and off-grid communities, primarily across Africa and the Middle East. The brief from UNHCR was simple: make it as bright as possible. More lumens, better rating.
But Arjen noticed something that bothered him. The LEDs we were using had a massive blue peak — cold white light that looked bright and modern but had a biological cost. Then an EU report surfaced showing that blue-heavy LED light was attracting mosquitoes in the field — a real problem in malaria-prone areas. On top of that, blue light in the evening suppresses melatonin, the hormone that tells your body it's time to sleep and repair. We were essentially introducing a modern city problem — screen-era sleep disruption — into communities that had never had it before.
We flagged it to UNHCR. We recommended dropping below 4,000 Kelvin, ideally to warm white around 2,700K. They weren't interested. In the field, people perceived the bluish light as brighter and more modern. So the spec stayed.
That experience planted a seed. Different wavelengths of light do different things to biology. That realization sent Arjen down a research path that would consume the next decade of his life.
Down the Rabbit Hole
While I was still running operations at Bright, Arjen started exploring the full spectrum of light — from ultraviolet to infrared. He read about UVB and vitamin D production in the skin. He learned about blue light and melatonin suppression. He went further into green light and its effects, then red, then near-infrared.
What surprised him was the sheer volume of research. Tens of thousands of peer-reviewed studies on red and near-infrared light therapy — from universities, independent researchers, NASA. A Finnish researcher named Vladimir Heiskanen had catalogued them all in a massive spreadsheet: study after study examining specific effects on knee pain, shoulder pain, skin conditions, wound healing, hair growth, infections.
Arjen is a skeptical person by nature. As he puts it: "Before, there were two categories — woo-woo stuff and 100% scientifically proven stuff. There wasn't much space for anything else." But as he went deeper, a third category emerged: I don't understand it yet — but that doesn't mean it's invalid. Thousands of studies. Millions of people using it. No marketing machine pushing it. Just a technology that kept working across decades.
In 2017, in our shared office in Hang Dong, Chiang Mai, Arjen built his first red light therapy prototype. Custom LEDs — expensive, only 8% efficient at the time — mounted on a simple lamp. He built it originally to help his wife with back pain. Here you see Christian's Mom using it still in 2026.
It worked.
Henning's Legs
At the same time, I was running a solar installation company out of the same building. One of my customers, Henning, came in to talk about putting solar panels on his roof. He walked in on crutches, and his legs were literally purple — severe circulation problems.
We looked at each other. Arjen had his prototype sitting in the next room.
"We have something for you," we told him. "We think this could help."
According to everything Arjen had read, near-infrared light should improve blood circulation — it relaxes the endothelial muscle layer around blood vessels, the same mechanism that opens up blood flow. But we'd never tried it on someone with circulation this bad.
Arjen treated the back of Henning's knee and his calf. Within an hour, the color in his legs visibly changed. We sat there, both of us, staring.
I remember exactly what I said: "Call your wife. Say goodbye. We're starting a startup."
Henning came back the next morning for more. He came so often that Arjen eventually built him his own device just to stop him showing up every day.
Cory
A few days later, another solar customer came through our door — Cory, a Belgian herbalist who could barely climb two steps into our building. She was in visible pain.
Arjen, who didn't know her at all, walked up and said: "This might sound weird, but I have something that might help you."
She was skeptical. She was a professional herbalist and Reiki practitioner — she had her own healing tradition. She said no. Then, twenty minutes later, she came back: "What the heck, I'll try it."
He treated her. The pain relief was immediate at the treated areas. She looked at him and said she'd been looking for something like this for years.
Cory went on to buy multiple units for her wellness practice. People in her circle still use them — seven, eight years later.
Building the FlexBeam
Those experiences became the foundation of Recharge Health, the company Arjen and I co-founded in 2018 in Chiang Mai. Arjen as CTO. Me as CEO.
We wanted to take what professional athletes had been using for years — the same technology behind $150,000 light therapy beds used by Nike and made by companies like Thor — and make it accessible. Portable. Something a normal person could afford and use at home.
The result was the FlexBeam: a wearable red light therapy device using 635nm red and 820nm near-infrared, with 7.5 watts of optical output power. We got it ISO 13485 certified as a medical device company. We launched on Indiegogo in October 2020 and raised over $815,000 in a year that made fundraising nearly impossible. The FlexBeam went on to sell over 40,000 units across more than 100 countries.
We gave it a five-year warranty — something almost nobody does in this industry. Norwegian tennis star Casper Ruud, Arsenal captain Martin Ødegaard, and NHL veteran Mats Zuccarello all became users and investors. The device became a favorite among athletes, therapists, and biohackers worldwide.
Arjen and I built that. From a prototype in a Hang Dong office to a globally recognized product.
What Happened Next
We're no longer with Recharge Health. The company moved its headquarters to Oslo, brought in new management, and went in a different direction. Our names don't appear on their About Us page anymore.
We don't need to go into the details. What matters is this: the two people who designed, engineered, and built the FlexBeam from scratch are now working together again — this time on our own terms.
Why AriHelder Exists
The name: Ari is a Dutch nickname for Arjen. Helder is his surname. I chose it, told Arjen, and fully expected him to say "yeah, that's what people call me." Turns out nobody has ever actually called him Ari. So now a company is named after a nickname he's never had. We thought that was funny enough to keep it.
Here's what we kept coming back to: even at $500, the FlexBeam was too expensive for most people where we live. I'd go out in Chiang Mai and people would joke — "That's you again? I already bought both your products. I'm broke." And it wasn't really a joke. $600 is a month's salary for many people here.
Arjen saw it daily. A colleague at his office needed a device badly — chronic neck stiffness, couldn't sleep. She couldn't afford one. She'd come to him for treatments when it got really bad. He'd help, she'd feel better, two weeks later she'd be back because she couldn't maintain it without consistent use.
Meanwhile, LEDs had gotten dramatically better. The custom LEDs Arjen used in 2017 were 8% efficient. The FlexBeam generation was around 35%. Today, the LEDs we're using in the AriHelder are nearly 50% efficient — almost as efficient as lasers. Custom-made by a specialist optoelectronics company in Shenzhen, with 30-degree output angles that deliver concentrated power at a comfortable 20cm distance.
That efficiency cascades through the entire product. When the LED is twice as efficient, you need a smaller fan, less heatsink, a lighter enclosure, a cheaper power supply. By running at 12V instead of 15V, we cut the power supply cost by 50%. No battery means no degradation after two years (the FlexBeam's battery lasted about 600 cycles). USB-C means you use the charger you already own.
The result: over 10 watts of optical output power — more than anything in its price class, more than many devices at three times the price — for under 5,000 Thai baht. About $140.
Open by Design
One more thing. We publish our LED specifications, our bill of materials, and our design details. You can verify for yourself that our product does exactly what we say it does.
This is not common in the red light therapy industry. Most brands hide behind vague marketing claims and won't tell you what's actually inside their device. We've tested the competition — Arjen has a test sphere in our lab — and the majority of affordable devices on the market use cheap LEDs with 80-90% of their energy in visible red light (because it looks powerful to the eye) and very little in the near-infrared spectrum where the real therapeutic value lies.
We don't do that. We tell you exactly what's inside, and we invite you to check.
What We're Good At (And What We're Not)
We'll be honest: we're not great at marketing. We're engineers and product people. Arjen has spent a decade studying light therapy and can explain the difference between 820nm and 850nm penetration depth off the top of his head. I know how to get a product from prototype to container. Neither of us is going to win an award for our Instagram presence.
But we know how to make a device that works. We've done it before — at scale, at quality, with five-year warranties and 40,000+ satisfied customers. We know what corners not to cut and which components actually matter.
No App. No Subscription. Just a Lamp.
You'll notice that AriHelder doesn't come with a companion app. There's no Bluetooth module. No wellness dashboard. No monthly subscription to unlock features.
This is deliberate. Most of the red light therapy industry is moving toward metrics-driven app ecosystems, personalized wellness subscriptions, and connected devices that track your sessions and nudge you with push notifications. We went the opposite direction.
We made a lamp. You plug it in, you turn it on, you use it for 20 minutes. When you're done, you turn it off. There's nothing to charge overnight, no firmware to update, no account to create.
The science hasn't changed. Red and near-infrared light at specific wavelengths, at sufficient power, for a consistent duration — that's what works. It worked in the NASA studies. It worked in Arjen's first prototype in 2017. It works now. You don't need an algorithm to tell you to use it.
We're old school. We think that's a feature.
AriHelder is everything we learned in a decade of building red light therapy products, distilled into something anyone can afford. Designed in Thailand. Made in Thailand — for now.
Our first production runs are here in Chiang Mai. But as demand grows, we'll scale manufacturing with our longtime friend and collaborator Peter Duan at E-Calling Electronics in Xiamen, China. Peter's factory produced the SunBell for us and other products over the years — he's rock solid, and we've worked together for over a decade. Xiamen is a beautiful island, and E-Calling is the kind of partner you build a production strategy around.
We believe red light therapy is about to explode in Thailand. The awareness is growing, the science is there, but until now there hasn't been a powerful, affordable device available locally. Most of what you can find on Lazada is cheap Chinese product with misleading specs — we've tested them. Once people here can try a real device at a real price point, we think the demand will be enormous. We want to be ready for it.
That's our story. We're just getting started.
Visit our showroom in Hang Dong, Chiang Mai to try it for yourself. Or check the product page and the published specs — we have nothing to hide.