You may have heard that car airbags deploy within milliseconds to protect passengers. What about airbags in your knees?
This is what former basketball prospect Kylin Shaw is working on at his startup, Hippos Exoskeleton. This product is a “knee sleeve” that measures stress on the knee joint and inflates around the knee to protect against serious injuries such as ACL and MCL tears. The sleeve inflates in 30 milliseconds, which is faster than the 60 milliseconds it takes for an ACL tear to occur, the company says.
“I myself have loved basketball since I was 6 years old, and over the next 10 years, basketball became my whole life,” Shaw told TechCrunch.
“I devoted myself to intensive training, but when I was 17 years old and preparing for my professional basketball career and NCAA tryouts, I heard a sickening ‘popping’ sound in my knee as I landed on a dunk,” he said.
The injury ended Shaw’s sports career prospects, but gave him the idea to combine AI-based sensors with a “knee bag”. He dropped out of the London School of Economics to develop it.
Hippos said the brace uses predictive AI to detect risky movements in real time and deploy airbags around the knee, potentially saving athletes thousands of dollars in medical costs.
Shaw and his co-founder Bhavy Metakar (CTO) initially bootstrapped Hippos by investing $1,000 of their savings to develop a prototype and generate initial pre-orders from hospitals and athletes. The startup has now raised a pre-seed round of $642,000 from investors Possible Ventures and Silicon Roundabout Ventures.
Shaw told Techcrunch that the company has already secured “well over six figures in pre-orders” and will use the new funding to further develop the product and push for a general launch in about three months.
He said the final device will cost about $129 and will be available with subscription plans ranging from $29 per month to $99 per month that include AI-based insights, a compact reservoir and exercise tracking.
The startup has conducted trials with British soccer clubs as well as star athletes such as world ski champion Alex Schlopy from the US ski team. Schlopy said in a statement: “I am very impressed with the preventive features and they are very light and comfortable! “This brace gives me psychological stability.”
In addition to elite athletes, Shaw said the product could be used to prevent injuries in others, such as people working on construction sites or the elderly.
A hippopotamus could be pushing an open door. Approximately 150,000 anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are reported each year in the United States and 8.6 million among adults worldwide, but these statistics do not include injuries in children. Additionally, most health solutions focus on rehabilitation rather than prevention.
Additionally, existing companies dealing with joint protection in the field of sports and rehabilitation focus on traditional support devices or post-injury support.
Brands in this space include Enovis’ DonJoy (orthopedic braces and supports), ExoKinetics’ Zeen (mainly recycling devices), and Shock Doctor (sports braces and protective equipment for injury management). None of these solutions offer predictive or reactive technology like Hippos airbags.
Thomas Wolf, co-founder and CSO of Huggingface, also participated in this round. Wayve co-founder Amar Shah and UK Athletics’ Chief Sports Medicine Physician Dr. James Brown.
