You’ve heard of car airbags deploying within milliseconds to protect passengers. How about an airbag for your knee? That’s what former basketball hopeful Kylin Shaw is working on with his startup, Hippos Exoskeleton — a “knee sleeve” that measures stress on the knee joint and inflates around the knee to protect it from major injuries like ACL and MCL tears . The sleeve inflates in 30 milliseconds, which the company says is faster than the 60 milliseconds it takes for ACL tears to occur.
“I, myself, have loved basketball since I was six years old, and for the next decade, it became my entire life,” Shaw told TechCrunch. “I dedicated myself to intensive training..
. But at 17, just as I was preparing for a professional basketball career and NCAA trials, I heard a sickening pop from my knee while landing from a dunk,” he said. The injury ended Shaw’s sporting career prospects, but it gave him the idea to combine AI-driven sensors and 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 deploys airbags around the knee, potentially saving athletes thousands in medical expenses. 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 clinics and athletes.
The startup has now raised a $642,000 pre-seed round from investors Possible Ventures.