Aadeel Akhtar on Building PSYONIC's Ability Hand for Amputees and Robots
Manufacturing Happy Hour
In a conversation on Manufacturing Happy Hour, host Chris Luecke spoke with Dr. Aadeel Akhtar, founder and CEO of PSYONIC, about how a childhood encounter in Pakistan led to a company that makes bionic hands. The central question running through the interview is how one device can serve two very different users: people with limb differences who need an affordable, advanced prosthesis, and robotics companies that need a capable humanlike hand. Akhtar's position is that the two uses reinforce each other. He also treats accessibility as the company's founding principle, and that shapes how PSYONIC seeks insurance coverage, raises money, and plans manufacturing.
What PSYONIC Makes
Asked to describe the company as he would to someone at a conference happy hour, Akhtar said PSYONIC develops "advanced bionic limbs that are accessible for humans and robots." He had an Ability Hand with him and demonstrated it live. In the demo he controlled it with two buttons. He explained that a person missing a hand would control it with their own muscles and nerves, while a robot would control it through AI.
Luecke observed that Akhtar seemed to carry the hand everywhere, both in this interview and on Shark Tank. Akhtar joked that it may have become an extension of his body, and that he notices when it is not in his hand.
A Girl in Pakistan and the Original Plan
Akhtar was born in the Chicago suburbs to parents from Pakistan. At seven, while visiting Pakistan, he met someone missing a limb for the first time. She was his age, missing her right leg, using a tree branch as a crutch, and living on the streets near a bazaar where his family was shopping. He said the encounter affected him deeply: they shared an ethnic heritage but had vastly different lives. That experience led to his plan to become a medical doctor who worked with people with amputations and limb differences and helped fit them with prosthetics.
The plan changed in stages. As a biology undergraduate at Loyola University Chicago, he took his first computer science class and loved coding and building things. He realized a conventional MD career would leave little room for that, so he looked for a way to combine prosthetics and engineering. Nearby, at the hospital then called the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and now the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab (which he described as the top rehabilitation hospital in the US for roughly 38 years), researchers were making breakthroughs with powered bionic limbs. Surgeons rewired nerves to different muscles, and patients used those new connections to control a multimillion-dollar hand developed by DARPA, Dean Kamen, and Johns Hopkins. Akhtar said that when he saw this, he knew it was exactly what he wanted to do.
He also saw the problem right away. Those hands were so expensive to develop and build that someone like the girl he met in Pakistan could never afford one. He went on to earn a master's in computer science at Loyola and taught there for a couple of years. He then entered the MD/PhD program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a second master's in electrical and computer engineering and a PhD in neuroscience. By then his plan was to finish the MD/PhD, work at an academic hospital, see patients about one day a week, and spend the rest of his time on research and development.
Ecuador and the Decision to Commercialize
The turning point came in summer 2014. Akhtar's group traveled to Quito, Ecuador, with the Range of Motion Project, a nonprofit that provides prosthetics to people who cannot afford them in the US, Guatemala, and Ecuador. He was midway through his PhD, and the team had started 3D printing its own hands. They brought a very early prototype, internally called "Mark 2." He described it as three times the size of an average adult hand, with wires everywhere, breadboards, and power supplies plugged into the wall.
Their first patient, Juan, had lost his left hand 35 years earlier in a landmine explosion while serving in the Ecuadorian army. After making a pinch with his left hand for the first time in 35 years, he told an international news station that he felt as though a part of him had come back. Akhtar said this was when he realized that if he stayed in academia, the work would end up as a journal paper. If everyone was to feel what Juan felt, the technology had to be commercialized. That, he said, is how PSYONIC was born.
Why He Stayed the Course
Luecke asked whether, over a path longer than a decade, Akhtar had ever considered a completely different direction. Akhtar said the goal never changed; only the route was roundabout. It went from MD, to MD/PhD, to an engineering PhD, to a neuroscience PhD, and then to a startup, which was never part of the plan.
The hardest choice was whether to finish medical school while running PSYONIC or to move the company to San Diego and go all in. He described a dinner with his first-year physiology professor, Dr. Kash Ahmed, who told him that his impact as a physician would be important but local to wherever he practiced, while PSYONIC could have global impact. Akhtar said that thinking about the greatest possible benefit kept him grounded. That meant reaching millions of people with limb differences and, eventually, the many companies using robots on manufacturing lines and in homes. In his view, the best way to achieve that is a startup that grows into a large, mature company.
Why San Diego
Luecke noted that medical robotics companies are usually associated with places like Boston. Akhtar pointed to San Diego's medtech and biotech hub, including orthopedic companies such as NuVasive, Globus, and SeaSpine, along with accelerator programs and biotech coming out of UC San Diego.
A key reason is PSYONIC's clinical research partners: Dr. James Flint at the Naval hospital and Dr. Kate Hinchcliffe at UCSD, who are working on the next generation of bionic limbs. Akhtar framed the goal as a broader regional strategy. The military hospital, UCSD, and the Challenged Athletes Foundation are local. The entertainment industry is about two and a half hours north in LA, and potential manufacturing is about 40 minutes south in Tijuana. He wants to bring those resources together and make San Diego "the bionics capital of the world," and said the company is well on its way.
How the Hand Attaches Today, and What Comes Next
Akhtar explained the current setup using a socket that lights up in response to muscle sensors. The user places their residual limb inside the socket, and two muscle sensors on either side detect muscle activity. The lights respond faster when the user flexes harder and slower when they flex less, and the hand responds the same way.
He listed the drawbacks of this approach. The sensors sit outside the body, which he compared to "wearing a shoe over your arm." It gets uncomfortable and sweaty, and under fluorescent lights, 60 Hz electrical noise interferes with the signals. Control is also indirect. Users select pre-programmed grips and cycle through them. He demonstrated a power grip, then slid the thumb over for a thumbs-up, then made a pinch. He said this works but is not the most natural way to control a hand.
The next generation aims to connect the hand the way a natural hand is connected. With Dr. Flint, PSYONIC is working on a titanium implant that goes directly into the bone and exits the body, so the hand can attach to it. With Dr. Hinchcliffe, fine microwire electrodes are implanted directly into nerves and muscles and routed out through a port at the end of the titanium implant. The hand would then be connected to the forearm's bones, muscles, and nerves. The goal is individual finger control instead of cycling through preset grips. Akhtar said that when clinical trials happen, they hope to have their first patients playing piano or typing on a keyboard again. He presented this as a hope for future trials, not a result achieved so far.
A Remote Demo from Milwaukee
To illustrate individual finger control, Akhtar let Luecke control the hand in San Diego from Milwaukee. Luecke held his hand up to the camera. Once it was recognized, the Ability Hand mirrored his fingers as he bent them. The connection briefly dropped when his hand left the frame. After it reconnected, the hand made a peace sign and a thumbs-up. Akhtar said it was one of the first times they had done a demo like this on air, and that it shows the kind of individual finger control the next-generation devices are aiming for.
Accessibility as a Design Requirement
Akhtar called accessibility one of PSYONIC's core tenets and "basically the lifeblood" of the company. From the beginning, a design goal was getting the hand covered by Medicare, because other insurers usually follow Medicare's lead. He said they achieved this, which expanded access from the roughly 10% of patients who could afford the hand to about 75% of Americans, for what he called the most advanced bionic hand on the market.
He said that still leaves about 25% who are uninsured, on Medicaid, or underinsured. It also leaves the 80% of amputees who live in developing nations, of whom fewer than 3% can afford an advanced bionic hand, by his figures. To reach them, PSYONIC created the Ability Fund, which partners with nonprofits to raise money for donated hands. Its most recent partner is the Range of Motion Project, the same organization from the Ecuador trip. According to Akhtar, every $25,000 donated covers a bionic hand plus all clinical services in the US, as well as a leg in Guatemala or Ecuador. He said this usually represents $100,000 to $150,000 worth of devices and services.
The first Ability Fund recipient is a San Diego teenager born without a hand. He emailed Akhtar in high school, said he had loved robotics since he was little, and asked to visit. At PSYONIC's offices he controlled a hand on his left side for the first time. Akhtar said the teen would be fitted the following week with a permanent hand to take home and use daily. "This is why we do what we do," Akhtar said.
Crowdfunding and a Mixed Funding Strategy
Luecke asked whether crowdfunding was connected to this community focus. Akhtar said part of the reasoning was that a company built around accessibility should make the company itself accessible. The result he valued most was that people who wear the hand invested in PSYONIC. He said users rarely get that chance, and that they now help make the product they use.
On managing funding from so many sources, Akhtar described a sequence. Government grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health grew out of his PhD research and gave the company a natural jump-start when he went full-time. He put NSF grants at about $2.4 million, possibly more now. To bring the product to market, PSYONIC raised a pre-seed round from angel investors and a few VCs. Then, he said, the company closed a round through StartEngine crowdfunding last year. He called it the seed round at first and later the pre-seed round, and said it raised over $4 million. He explained that the choice was driven by market conditions. Two years earlier had been, in his words, the worst time to raise money from VCs, so they looked for alternatives. He now wants sales to fund further growth.
Scaling Manufacturing When Demand Exceeds Supply
Luecke noted that demand for the hand currently exceeds production and asked how Akhtar balances the big vision with the unglamorous work of running a business. Akhtar credited a tight-knit team. When they moved to San Diego about two and a half years earlier there were seven people; now there are about 35. Everyone sees each other daily and stays aligned.
He said the top priority right now is increasing production. The team is making design changes to simplify design for manufacturing (DFM), and it is on track to quintuple production compared with last year. They are also designing a new version of the hand intended to eventually be made in the tens of thousands per year in a processing plant. He described this as being on the horizon, not in place yet. To carry it out, PSYONIC has hired experienced people locally, including from NuVasive, who have built full manufacturing lines and managed the handoff from engineering to manufacturing. As robotics companies ask for more hands, Akhtar said the company is still keeping ahead of humanoid robot demand, and that as long as it stays ahead, it will be fine.
One Hand for Humans and Robots
Luecke asked how a young company balances two such different markets. Akhtar said robots have historically been specialized for specific tasks and used grippers or pincers instead of humanlike hands. With the AI boom, he has seen rapid growth in the humanoid form factor. His reasoning is that factory jobs are designed for humans, so a robot doing human tasks should use a device optimized for human tasks.
The Ability Hand is self-contained, with all motors and electronics inside. For human users, it attaches with a specific connector. For robots, that connector is swapped for a bolt circle that mounts on arms such as KUKA or UR5, on Apptronik's humanoid robot, or on NASA's Valkyrie humanoid. The internals are the same in both versions.
He illustrated how the two uses feed each other with a story from NASA about a year and a half earlier. Valkyrie was using PSYONIC's hand, and engineers were struggling with a task one might find on the International Space Station: operating a zipper on a wall. PSYONIC's user experience specialist, Anukica Berlin, who wears an Ability Hand, walked up and did it easily. According to Akhtar, the NASA engineers said they hadn't thought of using the hand that way. His conclusion is that human users effectively serve as training sets for robot operators and show the best way to do tasks. He added that tutorial videos made for human users, such as cooking or doing laundry with an Ability Hand, can translate readily to humanoid robots doing the same tasks.
The Technologies That Made It Possible
Asked which advance made this kind of company feasible, Akhtar gave two answers. Over the past decade, the biggest factor has been microcontrollers getting smaller, cheaper, and more powerful. The hand contains seven ARM Cortex processors. He first said M4, then corrected himself to say he thinks they are now M0, which are even smaller. He said this would have been much harder ten years ago: the parts would have been very expensive, and the hand could not have been made this small.
Looking ahead, he expects software and AI to catch up. Low-power hardware with substantial processing capability should allow more efficient AI algorithms to run on the device itself, at the edge, instead of relying on the large computers once needed to process neural and muscle data. He sees this as the next revolution, and one that will benefit technologies like direct nerve implants. He mentioned neurotech companies building brain-machine interfaces, including Neuralink, Synchron, and Phantom Neuro. In his view, these will combine with the AI push in robotics, and PSYONIC sits at the intersection, with AI as the link between neurotech and robotics. Luecke added that the human side belongs in that mix too.
Behind the Scenes at Shark Tank
Akhtar is the show's first Shark Tank alumnus. He said Shark Tank had not been on his radar because PSYONIC makes a medical device, not a direct-to-consumer product. ABC's producers contacted the company first. PSYONIC already had strong marketing material, including a video of Sergeant Anderson, who later appeared on the show with Akhtar, punching through three wooden boards set on fire to show the hand's durability. While brainstorming on the phone with producers, they proposed a live board-breaking demo, and the producers liked it.
He later learned that about 140,000 people or teams applied for Season 15. Around 100 were filmed and about 60 aired, which he calculated as less than half a percent. He joked that if he had known, he might not have gone through the process. The pitch lasted about 45 minutes and was edited down to about 10. He regretted that one cut segment showed Mark Cuban controlling the hand remotely, just as Luecke had in this interview.
He described the experience as "exhilarating and nerve-wracking." The room felt much bigger than expected: the sharks sat about 20 feet away, and distant cameras made them look closer. Only the first two minutes were scripted, including his opening and Anderson's board-breaking. The rest was about 40 minutes of rapid-fire questions. He compared it to a standard VC pitch: if you know your numbers well, not much is different.
On the drama of Mark Cuban and Robert Herjavec declining, Akhtar noted that those were the two sharks PSYONIC had most wanted. The team had rehearsed scenarios such as every shark saying no or various sharks saying yes. He said some of it was impossible to prepare for, and he did not expect three sharks to team up, let alone those particular three. Much of it was spur of the moment.
For the negotiation, the parallel StartEngine campaign mattered. PSYONIC wanted to hold a firm valuation, which he said was about $50 million at the time and is higher now. The strategy was to keep that valuation and give any additional equity as advisor shares to the sharks who joined. He said this worked well. He also pointed out that the on-air deal is only a starting point, followed by due diligence and further negotiation, and that knowing this took some pressure off.
His biggest takeaway from working with high-profile investors was seeing how much excitement now surrounds the field. He recalled the DARPA Robotics Challenge and Google buying robotics companies about ten years ago, followed by a fading of that hype, and said interest is now "way back up." The intersection of neurotech and robotics in particular is nascent and growing faster than ever, in his view. Having major investors behind it validates work he has wanted to do his whole life.
Closing Advice
Asked for final advice, Akhtar talked about gratitude. He said he is grateful to work in a field he has loved and wanted to work in his entire life, and that this makes 80-hour work weeks manageable because it is his life's work. He also said he is grateful for a supportive family and team. He believes a lens of gratitude has contributed greatly to PSYONIC's success and suggested that many companies would benefit from adopting it.
All right, Dr. Aadeel Akhtar, welcome to Manufacturing Happy Hour. I'm not going to lie, I had a lot of fun watching your Shark Tank episode right before we started doing this. So, that was a new way to prepare for one of these episodes. You did a great job. We'll get into that later. I don't want to do any spoilers quite yet for anyone, but you know, hey,
in the spirit of Manufacturing Happy Hour, we describe things on this show in a candid fashion as if we're having a beverage with one another. So, let's say you and I... Yeah. Let's say you and I are hanging out in the hallway or at a happy hour at the Robotics Summit in Boston here in a little less than a month from when this comes out. How do you describe what PSYONIC and the Ability Hand do if you're just meeting someone for the first time?
Yeah, so at PSYONIC, we develop advanced bionic limbs that are accessible for humans and robots. And I've got the Ability Hand with me right here. So you get to see a live demonstration of it as well. So for example, I'm using these two buttons to control it. If I was missing my hand, I could use my muscles and nerves directly. If I was a robot, then I can just use AI to control it as well. So, we've made it for both humans and robots.
Do you always carry one of those Ability Hands around with you now? Because between this interview and the Shark Tank episode, I've only seen you with one of those in hand.
It might have become an extension of my body at this point. So, I feel when I don't have it in hand, I'm aware of it not being in my hands.
Sure. Well, you've truly dedicated your life to developing this in some way, shape, or form, and that's what we'll dive into first before we get into a bit of the nuts and bolts of the Ability Hand and the work you're doing. If I recall correctly, you had an experience when you were 7 years old that ultimately set you on the path to creating this company. Tell us about that scenario.
Yeah. When I was seven, my parents are from Pakistan. I was born in the Chicago suburbs, but I was visiting Pakistan when I was seven. And that's the first time I met someone missing a limb. She was my age, missing her right leg, using a tree branch as a crutch, living in the streets. We were visiting like a bazaar for just shopping. And she was right around the corner. And you know, that had a profound effect on me. We share the same ethnic heritage, but we have such vastly different qualities of life. And that kind of spurred me to want to go and solve these kinds of issues in particular, with the original plan of becoming a medical doctor, and then it turned into something even bigger than that.
Well, that's an interesting point you bring up. At what point, was it a moment, was it an evolution, that you realized that, hey, being a medical doctor is fine, but actually there's a different path I can take? What was that moment like? Tell us how that change started to happen.
Yeah. And so there were a couple moments in particular. The original plan was to become an MD that would work with people who have limb differences and amputations, right? So that we could get prosthetics on them. And it was my undergraduate, when I was at Loyola University of Chicago for my undergraduate degree in biology. I took my first computer science class and I loved it. I loved everything about coding and building my own things. And I was like, if I become a straight-up MD, I don't get to do any of this cool stuff. So, how can I combine these two interests in prosthetics as well as engineering?
And right down the street in Chicago, Illinois, in downtown Chicago, there's a hospital that used to be called the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. It's now known as the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. It's the number one rehabilitation hospital in the US for the last I think like 38 years or something like that. And they had these huge breakthroughs in these newly powered bionic limbs, where they were doing these surgeries where they would rewire nerves to different muscles in people's bodies, and then you could use those new nerve rewirings to control this multi-million dollar hand that was developed by DARPA and Dean Kamen and Johns Hopkins. And when I saw this I was like, this is it. This is exactly what I want to do. It's a perfect combination of engineering and clinical medicine and prosthetics.
But one of the big problems was that those hands were just so expensive to do R&D on and manufacture that, from an accessibility standpoint, for someone in Pakistan that wouldn't actually be something that they would ever be able to afford.
And so I went on to get a master's in computer science from Loyola, taught there for a couple years, then went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I entered their MD-PhD program, got another master's in electrical and computer engineering, and a PhD in neuroscience. And then I ended up leaving medical school. And part of the reason was because the original plan, or I guess the modified plan, was that I'd finish the MD-PhD, work at an academic hospital, see patients like one day a week, and then do R&D on stuff like this for the rest of the week.
And in the summer of 2014, we got the chance to go down to Quito, Ecuador, where we were working with a nonprofit organization known as the Range of Motion Project. Their mission is to provide prosthetics to those who can't afford them in the US, Guatemala, and Ecuador. And I was in the middle of my PhD. We started 3D printing our own hands at that time. And we had a very, very early prototype of the Ability Hand. We internally call it Mark 2. And it was three times the size of an average adult human hand with wires going everywhere, pulling their breadboards, power supplies in the wall. And our first patient ever, Juan Sukio, had lost his left hand 35 years prior due to a landmine explosion. He was in the Ecuadorian army. And in front of an international news station, he said he felt as though a part of him had come back, because he made a pinch with his left hand for the first time in 35 years.
And that's when I realized, if I stay in academia, if I have this plan of, you know, working at an academic hospital, this just ends up as a journal paper. And if we want everyone to feel the exact same way that Juan did, we had to commercialize this technology. And that's when PSYONIC was born.
Very cool. So, multiple moments that galvanized your experience on this path. Maybe this next question's less relevant now because I might have an idea of how you might answer it, but was there ever a point, you know, because this took a long time to really go through school, go through your PhD, get PSYONIC off the ground, was there ever a point where you thought about just going a completely different direction? And if not, what would you say helped you stay on track and focus this whole time? Because a lot of stuff can happen over the course of a decade plus.
Yeah. You know, this was always the goal. It was just a very circuitous route to get there, right? The original plan was MD, right? Then MD-PhD, then PhD in engineering, then PhD in neuroscience, and then startup company, right? Startup company was never part of the plan. And one of the reasons why, what really made that startup path the most worth it, was that I had to decide at one point whether I wanted to finish medical school while running PSYONIC, or we move the company to San Diego and we just go all in.
And I had dinner with my M1 physiology professor, Dr. Kash Ahmed, and he was telling me that, you know, if you become an MD, then your impact will be very important, but it'll be very local to wherever you practice. What you can do with PSYONIC can have global impact. And I think that was the motivating factor behind it, the most amount of impact that we can make. And really the best way to do that is through a startup that eventually grows into a large mature company, right? Just affecting millions of people around the world with limb differences, but also millions of companies who are using robots that will eventually be in manufacturing lines and in the home, etc. And I think that's what kept everything rooted and grounded: how could we make the most beneficial impact on humanity, depending on what path we were going to go on. And fortunately we're able to navigate that to where we're at now.
Yeah. And I'm sure the folks in manufacturing and robotics listening to this are going to take away a lot from your discernment process that you just shared throughout this story that allowed you to stick with your goals, because I know a lot of people listening to this have their own big visions and goals. I want to pivot a little bit to talking about PSYONIC, and maybe my first question is, when I think of a robotics company, or a robotics company with a medical spin, I default to cities like Boston, maybe rightly or wrongly, for example. What has made San Diego a sweet spot for this?
Yeah. So, there's a big medtech and biotech hub in San Diego in particular, right? So, we've got a bunch of orthopedic companies like NuVasive, Globus, and SeaSpine. So, there was the whole orthopedic element there. And, you know, there's a bunch of accelerator programs, biotech coming out of University of California, San Diego. But a lot of the big reasons for us are that, one, we're working very closely with the Navy Hospital. So, Dr. James Flint at the Navy Hospital and Dr. Kate Hinchcliffe at UCSD on the next generation of these bionic limbs.
So, for example, the way that these hands typically go on is you actually have something called a socket, right? So, this is a very fancy one that lights up according to muscle sensors, but essentially you'll put your arm inside the socket, and then we have two muscle sensors on the right and left sides, and then when those muscle sensors are activated, you can see these are lighting up in particular, right? In response to the muscles, right? So, it lights up much faster when you flex harder and it lights up much slower, right? So, you put your arm in here and then the hand responds to that. And the muscle sensors are located on the outside of your body. And the thing is that that's kind of still like wearing a shoe over your arm. So, it gets uncomfortable, it gets sweaty. You go under fluorescent lights and the 60 Hz noise messes with the electrical signals, right? And the way that a natural hand is connected to your body is through your bones, right? Your hand is connected to your bones.
And so what we're working on with Dr. Flint at the Navy Hospital is a titanium implant that can go directly into your bones and comes out of your body, and then the hand directly attaches to it. And instead of having the muscle sensors on the outside, with Dr. Hinchcliffe, she's implanting fine microwire electrodes directly into the nerves itself, into the muscles. And then those come through a port at the end of that titanium implant. And basically you're connecting the hand directly to your bones and your muscles and your nerves, like a natural hand should be attached. And the idea there is that instead of doing, you know, I'm doing these pre-programmed grips, right? So this is like a power grip. I can slide the thumb over, turn, and do a thumbs up. Then we can do a pinch, for example, right? But it's not necessarily the most natural way of controlling. They're controlling these pre-programmed grips and then cycling through them, right? And with these nerve implants and these muscle implants through this bone connection, the idea is that you'd actually be able to do individual finger control.
And so Chris, we're going to do something fun here. You're actually going to get to control this hand that I'm holding, even though you're all the way... are you in Boston? I'm actually in Milwaukee. So kind of halfway between us, but let's see how this works as I control it from Milwaukee. Exactly. So I'm in San Diego. You're in Milwaukee. And then if you just put your hand up to the camera, we'll see if I can actually get this recognized. Okay. Yeah. So, I got it right there. And then go ahead and bend your fingers.
Yeah. Look at that. Incredible. So, for the folks listening to the audio version of this, I'm literally bending my fingers and the Ability Hand is responding in turn. And you can do individual fingers too. Oh, yeah. Let's do that. I'm going to do a peace sign real quick. Let's see. Get that back. We lost your hand when you had gotten it back on. Oh, got it. Okay. Yeah. So, let's try it now. All right. We'll do it one more time here. Yeah. There we go. Okay. All right. And I'm going to do a peace sign here. Nice. Excellent. And then one more thumbs up and we'll call it good. There we go. Excellent demo. One of the first times doing a demo like that on air.
And so, yeah, that's the next generation of these devices, right? Where we can actually get this individual finger control working, right? And we're hoping that when we do clinical trials on this, we'll have our first patients playing piano or typing on a keyboard again. And the future is going to be really exciting on that front.
Yeah. No, this is great. So really, if we were to summarize the way this works, if we were having a quick beverage, if you were chatting with someone at the bar, you're using a titanium implant and nerve and muscle implants, and that's what allows the hand to work, let's say, if it's attached to, you know, half of someone's arm, if you will. Is that correct? Attached at their elbow, or what would be a cleaner way just to clean that up slightly?
Yeah, their forearm. Exactly. Right. So we'd be attaching the hand directly to the bones, muscles, and nerves that are in your forearm to give them the most optimal control possible. And going back to your earlier question, our goal in moving to San Diego was to bring together all these resources like the military hospital, UCSD, and the Challenged Athletes Foundation. We've got the entertainment industry in LA just like two and a half hours north. We've got potential manufacturing in Tijuana just like 40 minutes south. And just to bring all of those resources together and turn San Diego into the bionics capital of the world. And so we've got all those pieces together and we're well on our way.
Very cool. Well, that makes a lot of sense. And from what I remembered about San Diego, I'm like, I'm pretty sure there's a big orthopedic biotech scene down there as well. So I appreciate you taking us through that as well as how the Ability Hand works. You know, one thing that came up in our earlier conversations, I've got some business and, let's say, manufacturability questions about this. You've mentioned the importance of, you know, you met a girl in Pakistan, you met someone in Ecuador, right? You've traveled to a lot of different parts of the world, and you want to make this technology accessible to different people, not just, let's say, a technology for those that can easily afford it, if you will. How are you prioritizing accessibility in your business?
Yeah, and so it's one of our core tenets. I mean, it's basically the lifeblood of the company, starting from the girl that I met in Pakistan as well as when we worked with the Range of Motion Project in Ecuador and in the US. When we started building these hands, it was a design goal from the beginning that we needed to get it covered under Medicare, because if
Medicare covered it, then usually all the other insurance companies will follow suit, and we were able to do that. And in doing that, we expanded access from 10% of patients who could afford the hand to 75% of Americans who can afford the most advanced bionic hand on the market. But that still leaves 25% who are uninsured, on Medicaid or underinsured, and then 80% of amputees who are in developing nations, of whom less than 3% can afford an advanced bionic hand.
And so we have this initiative called the Ability Fund that can partner with nonprofit organizations to raise funds to donate to get someone an Ability Hand. And most recently we've partnered with the Range of Motion Project, who this whole thing started from, and basically for every 25K that's donated, it will completely cover all of the costs of a bionic hand and all the clinical services, as well as a leg. So a bionic hand in the US, a leg in Guatemala or Ecuador. And this is typically like $100,000 to $150,000 worth of devices and services that we're able to do at such a low price so that we can get it to as many people as possible who need it. And that has been an important mission for us that we've been able to do this.
And so our very first recipient of the Ability Fund is a local San Diego kid. He was born without his hand, and he sent me an email while he was in high school and said, you know, is it okay if I come visit you guys? I've loved robotics ever since I was little. And he came over to our offices and for the first time in his life, he controlled a hand on his left side. And just this upcoming week, he's actually going to be fitted with his permanent hand that he's going to be going home with and using on a daily basis for the first time in his life. And this is why we do what we do.
No, that's incredible. And, you know, maybe I'm connecting two things that aren't connected, but is this why crowdfunding has been part of your model as well, to involve that community aspect to make things like the Ability Fund possible?
And so one of the reasons why we went the crowdfunding route in particular was because if we're a company that's all about accessibility, why wouldn't we just make the company itself accessible? And one of the most beautiful things that came out of that is that our own users, our own wearers of the bionic hand, invested in the company. And that's something that you don't typically get a chance to do. And it's like we get to make this for them and they get to be a part of making this for them. So I'm so glad that we were able to give that opportunity to many of our users.
A business question now. Has it been a challenge, or how have you navigated raising funds in a number of different areas? I mean, you get government grants, you've raised money through, I believe, StartEngine, you're doing crowdfunding, you have Shark Tank, which we'll get to a little later. I mean, that's a pretty unique wide mix. How do you manage that, out of curiosity?
Yeah, so a lot of the government grants stemmed from my background doing a PhD, right? So we worked with the National Science Foundation before, National Institutes of Health, and so a lot of the R&D development that we do is kind of an extension of a lot of the work that I was doing as part of my PhD. And so that was just a natural way of kind of jumpstarting the company as soon as I graduated and we went full-time in PSYONIC. So we won like 2.4 million in grants from the National Science Foundation. It might be a little bit more now, too.
And in order to really get this thing to market, though, we raised a seed round, sorry, pre-seed round, from angel investors and a couple VCs. And then last year I think we closed on our seed round, which was done through StartEngine and crowdfunding in particular. And a lot of that was just dependent on, you know, what was the market looking like. Two years ago was the worst time to raise capital, like, period, from VCs. And we were like, okay, so what are our alternatives here? And so crowdfunding was one of the options that we had, and it was very, very successful. We raised over 4 million on that for our pre-seed round, and now we're just scaling up our manufacturing so that we can get this hand out to as many people as possible, and then use our sales to propel us forward even further.
Yeah, on that note, I'm very curious, because not only is your company funded, but you're also generating a lot of sales today. And as I understand it, the demand is outpacing production right now. What is it like knowing that if you could make more of these, people would buy more? But then how do you prioritize just the day-to-day nitty-gritty of running a business without getting too drawn into the vision, if you will, that you lose track of the things that you need to do to make sure the business survives on a regular basis? Because I think a lot of very creative entrepreneurial individuals that listen to this struggle with that as well, where they've got big visions and sometimes it can take away from just taking care of the nonsexy stuff that needs to get addressed to make a business run and grow.
Oh, absolutely. And fortunately, we have a very tight-knit team. When we moved here to San Diego two and a half years ago, there were only seven of us, and now there's about 35. So we more than quintupled in the last two and a half years. And every day we all see each other, right? And we're always making sure that everyone knows what we're all doing. We're all heading towards the same place. And our biggest focus right now is increasing our manufacturing production, right? So making design changes to the hand that just make the DFM process way easier. So this year we're already on track to quintuple our production from last year.
And then we're always working on new versions of everything, right? We're designing a new version of the hand that we can eventually start to make tens of thousands of them per year in a processing plant. So that's all on the horizon and in the pipeline, and who's really putting together the team that can execute on that in particular. So we've got people who are extremely experienced from places like NuVasive that we were able to recruit from here in San Diego, who have built out entire manufacturing lines and those processes of transferring from the engineering to the manufacturing in particular so that we can scale. So it's an exciting time for us too, because it's like, okay, now as the robotics companies are starting to ask for more and more hands, we're still outpacing the demand for humanoid robots. So as long as we stay ahead of that, we're going to be doing fine.
Dr. Akhtar, I'm going to go back to something you mentioned very early in our conversation. You mentioned, hey, we're using this for prosthetics, but we're also using this hand. It's AI powered as well. It can go on another robot, if you will. That's something I do want to revisit with you, because I feel like those could be two very different use cases for your product. How are you balancing that as a younger company? Making sure you're prioritizing both someone that is going to have this as their replacement arm, replacement hand, if you will, as well as this being used in, let's say, a general factory setting by a robot. How are you balancing that? How are you prioritizing both?
Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, historically, right, robots have been very specialized for particular tasks. And so you wouldn't really see a human-looking hand on a robot. Usually it'd be like a gripper or a pincer or something like that, right? And with this huge boom in AI, we've seen this crazy expansion into the humanoid robot form factor in particular, because the jobs that you're talking about, these manufacturing lines, they are jobs that are done by humans, right? So if you're going to be having your robot do human tasks, it makes sense that you would use the device that's optimized for humans to do human tasks, right? And so the thing is, I can pop this hand off, and everything is self-contained within this hand. So all the motors, all the electronics and everything, right? So this is the specific connector that goes on a human user. We swap that out for a bolt circle, and then that can plug into a KUKA arm, that can plug into a UR5, any of the robot arms that are on there. Apptronik's humanoid robot, NASA's Valkyrie humanoid robot as well. And the internals, it's all the same, right? And it's very unique in that sense, because the thing is, like I said, if our human users can do it, then the robot users are going to do the same thing.
And a story that I usually like to tell here too is that we went to NASA about a year and a half ago, and their Valkyrie humanoid robot is using our hand on it, and they were trying to do a task that you might find on the International Space Station, which is like a zipper that was on a wall, and they were kind of struggling to do it with our hand. But we had one of our users, our user experience specialist Anukica Berlin, with us, and she goes up to the wall and with her Ability Hand she's easily able to do it. And the NASA engineers were like, oh, we didn't even think about using the hand in this particular way. And so the thing is that our human operators basically work as training sets for the robot operators, so that they know what the optimal way to do a lot of these tasks is. And a lot of the tutorial videos that we put out for our human users, like cooking with an Ability Hand or doing laundry with an Ability Hand, can then easily translate to a humanoid robot trying to do those same tasks.
I have one more big question, and I feel like this question could be a podcast episode in and of itself, so I'm going to ask it in a way that yields just basically one answer. But, you know, looking at a company like yours, I feel like even 10 years ago it would have been very hard to do something like this based on where AI was at the time, based on where robotic manipulation was at the time. Just a lot of different technical barriers that in a very short time, I feel, we've made a ton of progress on just in general. What would you say is one of the technological advancements that has made this so feasible at this particular point in time? And I'm sure there are more than a few, but if you can pick the one that sticks out the most, I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
That's a good one. I think the biggest thing would be, or wait, which timeline are we talking about? Like within the last 10 years, or like right now?
If you want to give me both, I'd be curious. I mean, if you have a different answer for each of them, I'd be very curious to hear what is the one that's come up over the last 10 years and one that's just very immediately front of mind as well.
Yeah. So I would say over the last 10 years the biggest thing would be microcontrollers. The reduction in size and the price and the processing power of microcontrollers has been huge, huge, huge. We've got seven ARM Cortex-M4 processors in here. Actually, I think they're M0 now, so they're even smaller than what we had before. And that was a lot harder to do 10 years ago. They'd be really expensive; the hand would not be able to be made this small. So I think on the hardware side there's just been a lot of miniaturization on that front, as well as cost reduction.
And now I think what's caught up to that as well is just the software, the AI side, right? And I think that's what we're going to be seeing over the next couple years: now that we have this low power consumption hardware that can do a lot of processing on here, we can use that to now run AI algorithms that are much more efficient on the device itself, on the edge, rather than having to do these big supercomputers that we needed to have before to do a lot of this processing of neural data and muscle data and things like that. So I think that's the next revolution we're going to see. And that's going to be able to take advantage of a lot of those things that I was talking about, like direct nerve implants. And, I mean, you see the big neurotech companies that are doing this, like, what is it? Neuralink and Synchron and Phantom Neuro. They're all doing these brain-machine interfaces, and that's going to be combined with this huge AI push on the robotic side. And we sit at that intersection, which is just really, really unique and exciting to see, where we're bridging both the neurotech side with the robotic side, with AI being the connecting piece between the two.
Yeah, I really like that answer, and that it does bring together both the hardware side, the software side, and the human side. Very great point. And I think a lot of times we default to one or the other. Software and AI, I feel like, get a lot of the credit right now, but I appreciate you bringing in that mix and how we are at a very unique juncture with all of these technologies and the human element all coming together.
So, with the last part of our interview, we've got to go behind the scenes at Shark Tank a little bit, because I think you are the first Shark Tank alumni to be on this show. So, you know, paint the picture of what it's like walking into Shark Tank, right? We see it on TV. It's this whiz-bang, what feels just like 10-minute rapid-fire conversation. What does it feel like walking into that arena, if you will?
Yeah. And backing up a little bit on that too, just even the audition process was just crazy, right? And we were actually called by the producers of ABC, and they were like, "Hey, would you like to be on the show?" And it was never necessarily on my radar, because, you know, this is a medical device. It's not a direct-to-consumer product, right? But we had a lot of strong marketing behind it, right? We had Sergeant Anderson, who was on Shark Tank with me. We had a video of him punching through three wooden boards we set on fire, right, to show off the durability of the Ability Hand. And so when we were on the phone, we were brainstorming ideas of what we can do, and we were like, "We can do a live board-breaking demonstration." And they were like, "Oh, this is awesome."
And so some of the stats that I found out later on was that 140,000 people or teams applied for Shark Tank in just season 15. And of that, like a hundred get filmed and 60 actually aired. So it's like less than half of a percent actually getting on the show. So had I known that, I might not have gone through the entire process for doing it. But you're on there for like 45 minutes, and then they condense it down. They edit a lot of things down to about 10 minutes. And one of the things I was so sad that they ended up editing out, too, was that Mark Cuban actually did the same demo that you did, where you actually got to control the hand, but it didn't actually make it into the final cut because they needed to just reduce a lot of the time on that too.
So, but it was exhilarating and nerve-wracking at the same time. The room feels way bigger than you ever think. Like, the sharks are like 20 feet away from you, but the cameras are so far it makes it seem a lot closer. And yeah, there was just
It was just, a lot of it was like, if you've pitched to VCs before, a lot of it was just the standard VC pitch. So if you know your numbers really well, then nothing is really different on that front. But the only thing that was scripted was the first two minutes where I gave my spiel, right, where we had Sergeant Anderson do the board-breaking demonstration, but then it's just 40 minutes of just rapid-fire grilling from the Sharks.
Yeah. So what I like about that is there are some, like, you're practicing for that every day, basically. There are a lot of similarities between... Yeah, a lot of similarities between that and an everyday VC pitch.
Let me ask this. You know, and I don't want to give everything away because I'll have a link to this in the show notes. I think people should go watch it for themselves. What is it like being in that moment, though? Because there is some showmanship to this. What is it like, you know, having Mark Cuban and then Robert pass up on you before you get into the negotiation with the other folks? How do you navigate that in that moment to just stay on your game?
You know, it's funny because those were the two top Sharks we were targeting in the first place, too. And honestly, I think we went through a bunch of scenarios, too, in just practicing for it as well, like, you know, what happens if all the Sharks say no? What happens if various Sharks say yes? And so, I don't know, a lot of it you can't prepare for, and I wasn't sure what to... I was definitely not expecting for three Sharks to come together, right, and let alone which three Sharks they were. And so, yeah, a lot of it was just kind of spur of the moment: let's see what happens and let's see where this can go.
And one thing I imagine is the case with a lot of these, I mean, the deal you end up negotiating, how do you prepare for that to know what your walk-away amount is, what's going to be a fit, where you're willing to make compromises? How do you prepare for that part? Because you can prepare, you know, you obviously had your pitch ready to go. It was very well orchestrated. I was really impressed, and also just how you fielded all the questions leading up to that. But of course the negotiation, I would imagine that's the trickiest part, just being able to make some very big decisions in that moment. What was your strategy going into that, out of curiosity?
Yeah, absolutely. And so we had StartEngine going on at the same time, and so we had a pretty strict valuation that we wanted to stick to in particular. And so one of the ways that we had strategized on how we could approach that is that we can keep our valuation at, I think at the time it was 50 million, and now it's higher than that. But any additional equity that we give up would be advisor shares to these Sharks that would come on board. And that strategy actually worked out pretty well, that we could that way preserve our valuation while still having the Sharks on as advisers.
But also, on Shark Tank, what ends up happening on the show is the starting point of negotiations in the real world too. So it's not like the deal that is made on the show is final, like the papers are signed right there. And then it goes on for a while in due diligence and all of that. So knowing that takes a little bit of the pressure off too, because you know that whatever is negotiated at that point is just going to be kind of the starting point of real-world negotiations as well.
Out of curiosity, what is your biggest takeaway so far from having such, you know, high-caliber, well-known investors in this space? What is the biggest thing you've learned, or how has that been a benefit to the evolution of your company?
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is seeing all the excitement around this field that, you know, again, if we're looking back 10 years, it wasn't there, right? I mean, there was the DARPA Robotics Challenge that happened, and Google was buying a bunch of robotics companies about 10 years ago, but then, you know, that hype train went back down, and now it's way back up. And so seeing the amount of interest, especially at the intersection of neurotech and robotics, I think that's something that's very nascent and starting to grow a lot more than it was ever before. And having big investors behind that just is a testament to, this is an exciting field that's up and coming and emerging. And it's what I've wanted to work on my entire life. So it's a little validating on that front.
Yeah. No. Well, like I said, I encourage everyone that's listening to this, if you haven't, go check out Dr. Akhtar's performance on Shark Tank. Very impressive. The last thing I'll ask, hey, is there anything you wish I would have asked that I haven't yet? We covered a lot of ground in today's conversation. Is there anything you wish I would have brought up, or a final piece of advice you want to leave the audience with?
I guess as a final piece of advice, I think for me, approaching things from a lens of just gratitude has been immensely helpful. Right? I'm incredibly grateful that I get to work in a field that I've loved my entire life, that I've wanted to work in my entire life. And you know, that's what makes the 80-hour work weeks so doable, because this is my life's work, and I'm incredibly grateful that I have such a supportive family and supportive team to make this vision and this mission come true. And coming from a lens of gratitude has been immensely helpful to our success. And I think for a lot of companies, viewing things through that lens would be just extremely helpful as well.
Yeah. Well, I appreciate all the advice you've given us today, sharing your story, ending on a note of gratitude as a call to action for our audience as well. Dr. Akhtar, I'm looking forward to hanging out with you in Boston soon. Thank you so much for jumping on Manufacturing Happy Hour.
Thank you for having me. Cheers.
Article published