The Prosthetics and Orthotics Podcast

From Injury To Innovation: Building A Practical Myoelectric Hand with Ryan Saavedra

• Brent Wright and Joris Peels • Season 12 • Episode 7

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We share a personal update and then dive into how injuries, curiosity, and tough feedback shaped a modular myoelectric hand that is lighter, repairable in minutes, and priced for wider access. Ryan Saavedra of Alt-Bionics walks through additive manufacturing choices, PDAC approval, and a roadmap linking prosthetics with humanoid robotics.

• user and clinician pain points shaping design choices 
• modular finger architecture for fast field repairs 
• nylon 12 and MJF for strength, weight, and cost 
• tolerancing to reduce lash and improve reliability 
• pricing philosophy, PDAC approval, and reimbursement nuance 
• EMG control foundations, firmware over AI for stability 
• balancing service bureaus vs in-house manufacturing 
• funding from bootstrap to mission-aligned investors 
• product roadmap focused on hands and higher DoF 
• cross-pollination between prosthetics and robotics

Special thanks to Advanced 3D for sponsoring this episode.



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Brent:

Welcome to season 12 of the Prosthetics and Orthotics Podcast. This is where we connect with experts in the field, patients who use these devices, physical therapists, and the vendors who help bring it all together. Our mission remains the same: to share stories, tips, and insights that help improve patient outcomes. Tune in and join the conversation. We're glad you're here and hope it's the highlight of your day. Nobody knows this because the uh you know the the podcast keeps on going because we record so many, but uh I know you've been traveling. Uh I've been traveling a little bit. Actually, I go to um I fly out here in uh just a little bit. But uh it's been a it's been a crazy thing. And I have you have you ever had a pet, Yoris?

Joris:

Uh when I was a kid, uh not sound.

Brent:

Oh yeah. Okay.

Joris:

Oh yeah. So I'm sorry, I'm so sorry to hear that, Ma.

Brent:

So that is the craziest thing. So uh for those that don't know, I have uh had a little dog named Brody, and it was a family dog that uh and uh it was it was great, you know, it was great for the kids and such, but we had to say goodbye to Brody, and uh I now understand what people go through. And uh it was it was not a fun experience, I can tell you that. But uh, you know, it's it's cool to have all the memories and uh and all that stuff. And I always say that, you know, Brody, he traveled the the whole United States, he's probably been to more states than most uh most people have, and we had a good time with him while he was with us. But uh I I was talking with my wife the other day, and it's not that we haven't been uh sympathetic towards people that have dogs, but now that we truly understand the the loss of a uh of a pet, a family pet, uh we we we now you know just understand uh what that's like and so but everything's everything's good now, fine now. But uh it was this is a wild adventure that uh was interesting, I guess.

Joris:

Well, I'm so sorry to hear that. But I'm good at uh glad you guys are doing a little bit better now. Okay, so um we've got a guest today. So who's that?

Brent:

We do. Um, so we have Ryan Savedra with us today. He is the founder of a company called Altbionics that makes a uh prosthetic myoelectric hand. And uh and he has been living the startup grind for quite a while now, and we've known each other for a while. In fact, I had tried to get him on, man, when we first started the podcast, and he's like, hey man, I'm I'm like uh managing so many people across so many time zones. Like I just cannot make that time uh work. And uh, you know, now we have the opportunity to bring him on. So I'm really excited to kind of hear his journey, his story. Um and he is not a clinician, but he has created this piece of technology or technologies and is building a pretty neat business uh and leveraging additive manufacturing at the same time. So I'm really excited to hear the welcome to the show, Ryan.

Ryan:

Thank you. Yeah, yeah, I know it's it's been too long since I uh last talked with you, Brent. But I think, yeah, I was my schedule was ranging from like 10 a.m. is my start and like 10 p.m. is my end. And we work with people in Ukraine, China, Canada, Alaska, and so it was just it was tough. So I apologize, but I'm glad, very glad to be here now.

Joris:

Awesome. So so Ryan, tell tell us first off, like how'd you get involved with OMP?

Ryan:

Um, I don't know if it's relevant, but I've always had a kind of a fascination with hands. So I remember growing up, I'd look at artwork from like NC Escher. Like I loved his work with like um inception like hands, art, and his medium with like pencil and I tried to copy it. And I always liked the creates from the atom about my colonel and specifically the hand part because it was so hard to draw. Um, but then the relationship with hands kind of deepened. Uh junior year of high school, I was in dual crafting class. I dropped a file, tried to catch that file, and uh it landed straight up, and I went straight down to catch it, and it went through my hand. So I couldn't use my hand for three months after that. Um and then in college I took up rock climbing, and then rock climbing. I was with my friends out of an unchanted rock, took a fall, caught all of my weight with my ring finger, destroyed pretty much my A2 poly till the third and final time, and the doctor said, like, yeah, like you're gonna be in pain the rest of your life, or we can do an experimental surgery and we'll lose your A2 poly. And so uh they exercised it, and recovery took about six months. During that time, I honestly thought I was going to lose my finger. Four months in I took off the bandage and I remember the doctor saying, Oh, and he just looked very alarmed, and I was like, What do you mean? Oh, this isn't I don't want to hear that from you. He uh he said, just let it let it heal, let it, it'll it'll eventually heal. Um but I thought I was gonna leave it, and so I experimented at the time I was a sophomore enough to do anything on what UTF said, and I experimented with the idea of what if I didn't leave it, so I built a small mechanical finger out of cardboard from a Ziploc bag box and yarn and uh pair of electronics that I had um lying around for my previous birthday, and that was kind of how I got started. And so I thought, okay, what does it actually cost if I lost the finger? I made this one to a few bucks and change, and I was looking at like $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 price tags for just partial fingers. And so I thought, wow, what happened if I lose my hand? Like the entire hand. And that's when I found out they range anywhere from like $20,000 up to $150,000. And so I made it my mission, my junior year of college up until my senior year, to try and design a more affordable version of a myoelectric hand. Because I thought, you know, I built this one for some change, one finger for some change. And that's that's how I got started. So the story goes on from there. Uh, it turns into how we started the company.

Joris:

But well, I don't know, I I'm I'm curious about it, you know, because you're like a patient or you had these forms yourself, did it really change how you designed this, do you think, as opposed to if you would have just started doing this for another reason or for someone else, kind of?

Ryan:

Oh my gosh, yeah, I can't even tell you. It was that was uh from from the first injury that I had when a file went through my hand, I realized like how delicate hands actually are. Like one thing, it was a very small file, but because it went through my hand, there was just immense pain whenever I tried to use it. And that was the first time I realized that if your hand can adapt to things differently. And then in college, I had the same thing. Like that finger, I couldn't use it, but I learned to write a different way. And so that's why I say I have this interest in hand. So that kind of gave me this foundation of okay, if I am to design this, how do I want it to be? And how many possible considerations must I make, right? For the human hand with a with a myoelectric prosthetic for someone who normally typically has two sites of muscle activity to control these things. Um, so yes, I I think it's much, much different as if someone who just wanted to kind of experiment with these things, as opposed to, you know, someone like me who's had humorous hand injuries, like I can't tell you how many ligaments are torn, partially torn, or still bruised to this day. But they still rock fine. And ones respect almost every year, the hands are just the elephant. Like, yeah, I I like to think that I'm uh I'm pretty qualified to do this, uh, but it's it's just through all these injuries, I would say, and appreciation for hands.

Joris:

And also, do you think you made it like much more robust or maybe more precise, or maybe just like more wearable? Like, were there things that were you were where if you're looking at between like you know, cost versus dexterity versus weight, you know, were there things that you kind of looked at differently in that way as well?

Ryan:

But yeah, those were the biggest things. So I didn't just do this for me. Um, the whole point was to make this accessible for everyone. Uh, we know 30% or more of the US is uninsured. Um, but the biggest thing was that when I first started the company, I went out to as many prospectists as I could find, including some at the corporate level hanger clinic, um, as well as those with lung differences. And I asked them, hey, what are the biggest problems of your myoelectric hand today? And they kept saying the same exact things. It was, well, they're difficult to repair, time consuming to repair, and they're expensive. Like those were the two biggest things. And so those were the tenets that we used for basically defining our engineering map, our roadmap into what we wanted to build this land into. And so those were the first things that we tackled. We chose an extremely durable and robust material called nylon 12 or PA12. That is the only reason why we can do what we do at the cost that we do with that. Um but beyond that, uh, we chose to make it uh modular. And so if you do end up breaking a finger, you can swap it out in three minutes. You can do this as the person with limb difference or as a clinician in under five minutes, both. Uh so those were the kind of the key things that we wanted to tackle.

Joris:

Yeah, I think that's really cool. I love the fact that you it's just really normal in a lot of the design world to first look at the audience, right? And not only like only talking to patients, but also talking to the people who fit them. So I'm really happy you did that at the beginning. We see a lot of people that just kind of invent these things, like thinking they're like Leonardo da Vinci or something. But this is something that has to be worn. It's something that has to be, you know, done every day. And I think also it's gonna be something with like kind of some kind of business model has got to work for the whole value chain, so also the posters and stuff. So I'm really glad you you talk to users when you talk to the the the prosthetics community before starting your design journey. I think that's I've seen it go differently a lot of times. I think this is also, you know, it's also better for you. I think it's better for everyone generally, right?

Ryan:

Yeah, 100%. And I that's kind of a a thing I didn't know that I needed to do. It's more of just something that I wanted to do because as an engineer, like my whole thing, why I wanted to become an engineer is because I love problem solving, but I also love organization and efficiency. And obviously, if you're trying to build something from scratch, I mean, A, I knew I couldn't do it alone, but B, if it's for someone, then the people who wear it and fit it should be the ones who decide what's in it. We can add cool features and things, like there's a there's a flashlight on the back of the hand that can be pretty helpful, but the the core functionality was driven by those with learning differences as well as the uh prosthetic community, like clinicians, as well as um those in that field.

Brent:

As you've kind of just done this journey from your the prototyping stage now to obviously distribution, what is what has been the most challenging, I guess surprising thing of the whole journey? Has it taken longer than you expected? Uh has it been hard to get into the orthotic and prosthetic um space, as as some people say that it's uh you know kind of a kind of a closed door and you have to put in your dues and such. What what are some of the things that have been most challenging for you?

Ryan:

Yeah, so on the business front, I would say exactly that. It's just I'm surprised on how long it's taking uh some clinicians to kind of test this thing out and validate it. Like we have a lot of positive reception from those who are using this hand, uh users, but the clinicians obviously want more or other clinicians to say, like, yeah, my patient's using this as well, and they're having good results. And so there's just it's a very long process. Like we've been at it for about a year. Um, it's available today to purchase, but everyone's kind of waiting for everyone else to say, like, oh, I've tried the Genesis hand, and oh, the Genesis hand is good. But that's the most surprising thing to me because this is the world's most affordable hand by over half of the the least expensive alternative out there. And we don't sacrifice anything in functionality. Like the only thing that's different, or I guess you could call it worse, is that we have a 15-pound lifting capacity. And even that is more than enough for most activities of daily living. So that's just the most surprising thing for me on the business front. On the engineering side, it's how many, how many things the hand can actually do and how many different ways the hand can pick up things and how to account for all of that. And I like to classify the efficacy of our hand based on the percentage of tasks, like human-level tasks that it can complete. And just defining all of those has taken the entirety of our company's life cycle. And it's it's just incredible. Like I have such an appreciation for hands now. It's just they're I think Aristotle, yeah, Aristotle said the hand is the tool of tools, and I couldn't agree more.

Brent:

Yeah, I think that's wild. I mean, the it's so complex, and you you want to replace everything that's been the God-given, you know, things that the hand does, but you end up creating what your best representation is of tools and such for that. Can you tell us uh the role that additive manufacturing has played in in these iterations for your hand?

Ryan:

Yeah. So I think the first 22 iterations of the Genesis hand were all done with SLS, SLA, PLA, or not PLA, um FDM. Yeah, God, it's been so long since I've used FDM, I almost forgot the name. But yeah, all of the all of the first prototypes were used with those traditional types of 3D printing. And then I think it was a company called Additive America. I don't, I think we reached out to them or they reached out to us and they said, Hey, have you tried MJF? And I was like, no, what's MJF? And he's like, Oh, we can send you a sample and we got it. And I was like, This is this is 3D printed. Like this is this is remarkable. And so we tried one version of a finger. This was back when we were still using three phalanx designs. And we were just fascinated by it. It was, it was incredible, incredibly durable. It we could bend it like 60 degrees uh before it would actually break, and it didn't shatter, which was awesome because we were at a demo one time and we had this SLS print, and one of the ushers accidentally bumped the table. It fell to our hand fell the ground and just exploded everywhere. And I was like, well, that material is not the one. Um, so additive manufacturing helped not only in helping us create affordably our final product, but also in helping us get to where we are today with all of these iterative prototypes. So yeah, it's it's a game changer. I don't think, I don't think any of this would have been possible. Even the prototyping college that I built, which was the Brunnel hand for open bionics, would have been possible without multi-je or um traditional 3D printing.

Joris:

And and did you uh did you know a lot of CAD before? Did you know a lot of D Fam type of stuff before? Did you learn on the job? How did you master that side of it?

Ryan:

Yeah, so definitely not a jack of all trades by any means, but I was very interested in SOLIDWORKS during my um junior and senior year in college. And so I was able to kind of take the Brno Hand files and then modify them slightly to put like four sensors inside the fingertips and like an LED ring on the back of the hand. Um, my degree uh trained as an electrical engineer. And my focus in college was actually my independent research in college was electromyographic systems and control systems. And so this all kind of uh folded around my interest in hands, followed by my injuries, where I was just I wasn't really focused in college until my injury. And then I started pulling from my classes. I was like, I'm really interested in how how someone without a hand can control a bionic hand. So figured out how to build EMG sensors from scratch, uh, optimize them, improve them. And then my foundation with firmware, like the Arduino kit that I had was tremendously helpful. And then as a foundation, so it all kind of came together in that way. And then uh the original prototype in college had AI into it, but I I took an intro class to AI with like neural nets, and I honestly could only tell you the name of the algorithm or the model that we used. Um, so we removed AI, and it's pretty much all just firmware, hardware, uh and then smartphone app development.

Joris:

And did you well with regards to the added manufacturing part, were there any problems with it? I mean, you tried a whole bunch of things. You said some work better than others. Uh, you know, if you had to do it again, would you do, would you, for example, go straight to MJF or do you think, hey, you know what, having a desktop FTM printer actually actually lets you iterate faster? It's a nice step in the very beginning, for example, or what would you have done differently?

Ryan:

Yeah, um, it God, it's such a tough question because 3D printing's come such a long way in such a short even the past three years, right? Like with the advent of bamboo 3D printers or 3D printers in that price range, it would have been so different for us. Um, but yes, I would 100% we would have gotten bam, all three of us. So if you don't know, we are actually we were an entirely remote company. So our CTO was in Alaska, our director of engineering was in Ohio, um, our CFO is in New York, and I was in uh San Antonio, Texas. And so this was the process. It was we, I had a 3D printer that I got for my birthday before college. And it was like an Anycubic uh I3 mega or something. And I would 3D print it, I would put it together, and then my engineers would tell me how, and then I'd on a camera, on a call, I'd show them, hey, this is good, this is bad, and then we'd redesign and 3D print. But I cannot tell you how much faster it would have gone had we all had 3D printers and if we could have just been kind of doing this on our own. So I think going back, if I could do it over, I'd definitely still use FDM 3D printing, probably exclusively FDM, um, maybe SLA for some gears or something. But and then use MJF on things we wanted to test like high fidelity prototypes with. So yeah, I would, I would, uh things would be much different and things would have gone a lot faster. Um, yeah, so that's what I would have done.

Joris:

And in the final hand, like, are there 3D printed parts and what kind of 3D printed parts are in the final hand?

Ryan:

Yeah, the final hand is made entirely of MJF components, um, at least at its core. We have our distals of all four fingers and then our proximals of all four fingers. Uh, we have a dorsal plate, a poly plate, and then the thumb. And those are all multi-jet fusion 3D printed. And our hand is the lightest that we know of in the world right now. I think only actually, no, I think Bionics is a little lighter. Uh, at least they're older models. But it's at 458 grams or just over a pound, like 1.01 pounds. And that's because of MJF, because we can make these hollows inside of MJF that allow it to not be so solid. And that reduces the weight uh tremendously.

Joris:

You know, are you thinking, so do you still outsource? You know, are you thinking of like, oh my god, one point we want to do it all in-house? Or are you like, oh no, no, I want to like keep having my outsourcing partner make these parts and we'll focus on assembling and design or that kind of thing?

Ryan:

Uh if you asked me that a year ago, my answer would have been like, never want to in-house this. But today we've already gone through one situation where our manufacturer was actually acquired. And so we couldn't, we had to find someone else to 3D print our yeah, multi-jet fusion our parts. And so we want to avoid things like that from happening, of course. But um, I know how much effort and maintenance and time and money go into managing a multi-jet uh fusion 3D printer. And so I I I hesitate to make that purchase at least so early in our company's life cycle. Um, like we just launched this year, we just are starting to hit positive revenue. And uh yeah, I I so to answer the question, if we had the capital, and I talked with Brent and so many other people, experts in the space, about like what it actually took and got like a good bearing on it, then maybe. But for now, I think service bureaus and companies who can provide us with these prints with you know, we have QA requirements of all of the companies that we work with for these prints, but they're rigorous and it's like it's it's a lot. So I think we want to stay with them for now, but we may entertain the idea pretty soon.

Joris:

All right. So, and so you end up at a price of three, three and a half thousand. You could also just said, hey, uh, you know, what's the most expensive market um or the cheapest hand? Let's go 20% below that, right? Was there a reason why you picked three and a half thousand? And how did you manage to keep that price target?

Ryan:

Yeah, so sorry, I think I cut off, but I it our final price is not three and a half thousand. That was what I intended the price to actually be in the beginning. Um, but it turns out you can't kind of you know run a keep a company running at that price point. And so after I talked with my board and the whole team and my CFO, we kind of agreed on a higher price point, but it was the absolute minimum for me and the absolute maximum for my board and my team. And so that was kind of how we came to that price point. Um, but it it was decided primarily by me because I really want these things to eventually be the price of a phone. Like I want people to eventually be able to walk into a shop and hopefully, you know, Alt Bionics is on the name or like the door, but they can go into a shop and say, like, oh, hey, I want this version of the hand, or I want a Genesis hand, or I want a Genesis 2.0, or I want a Nova Impulse, or all these other hands that we have planned out. And, you know, they're an iPhone price. That's that's really what I want for the world because I think the market research is only as good as how many people have actually bought these things. And I think there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, people around the world who just can't afford this technology. And that's been my mission from the beginning, and I I really want to see it through. And so that's how the price point was developed. It was more of a selfish desire to make these things accessible.

Brent:

And a little bit about like just that that process, because you guys are PDAC approved, right? For the for the hand. So I I know that is not the most pleasant process ever. You'd probably rather go to a doctor or a dentist and get a few root canals before doing that. So, what does that actually mean? Like once you have the PDAC and you've got this, you know, code and then you have your pricing. And I know some people, I mean, that so uh you can get as far in as you want to on the pricing side of things, but there are some companies that say, hey, we're gonna be, you know, 50% of what you're gonna get reimbursed. Others are like, no, it doesn't cost us that much, and we're going to do what we do, and we're not even gonna pay attention to what the the cost or reimbursement is. How how did you approach all that?

Ryan:

Yeah, so it was a careful balance of talking to prosetists and understanding their sales process and understanding like how insurance will actually reimburse this. And it's it's so nuanced. Like, I I honestly probably am not the best person to talk to about this. Like, there's so many things that go into it. But for us, what we did and our our pitch and plea to both PDAC and the insurance companies and prosthetists is that look, you're gonna like your margins will come, but we need this to be affordable to people. Like, this is the whole point of why we do what we do. And I hope, and I have typically found that that is why prosthetists do what they do, it's to help people. And so that was kind of how we came to this, I don't know, understanding. It was a silent understanding, but um, yeah, the PDAC process, it's uh from what I've heard, yeah, it's a nightmare. But for us, I think just because of the way we approached it, uh, it it really wasn't. Like it was a very simple, quick process for us. And I I I I I hesitate to even say that because it sounds like it should have been much harder. But you know, we told them our mission, we told them our goal, and that's I think that may be kind of what drove that decision to be so quick.

Brent:

Yeah. Well, and one of the things that what what I have found, uh you know, especially most recently with coding in general, is the this the PDAC and um uh Medicaid, CMS, they they don't want to get left behind on the technology side of things. And they've been very seem to be very open on the technology side of things. Um, so I think that is always a plus. And uh, well, you you are um also coming in on some other people's uh information as well, and probably able to see what they've done. And so that's a that's cool, man. So I'm I'm really glad um that went well for you. That's that's fantastic. I'd I'd love for you to get into a little bit of the stuff that you talked about with the the when you were talking about the uh the two things that a lot of the companies talked about was one was price and one was serviceability. How how hard was it to engineer some of that stuff? Uh and then can you tell us a little bit about what kind of failures you were experiencing um with that? Because it seems like every every hand is going to have failures because you just don't know what people are going to do with it. But this idea of field serviceability is such a big deal to make sure that patients are able to uh have the most uptine as possible.

Ryan:

Yeah. Yeah. Um it was actually kind of an accident how we came into it. So it was a byproduct of us being a remote company that I said, like, look, I'm tired of like assembling all of these fingers. Can we can we figure out a way to just like make it a single module that we plug in? And we developed this kind of single monolithic finger component that included the motor inside of it. And then we said, oh, like, well, this is this is pretty neat. Like we we should add this in. We should make this like modular. And so that was how we decided. And um yeah, it was it was pretty tough, primarily how to secure it, obviously without infringing on the many, many patents there are in the bionic hand space um into the palm. And so we figured out a way, we developed our own patent around it or got our own patent approved around this method. Um, we have like a clamshell design where our fingers go in like these cradles, and then the dorsal plate secures them in place. And so the biggest challenge with that was tolerancing. Because as you know, MJF can go down to, I think, like eight thousandths of an inch by recommended. No, no, it's like eight or eight or twelve thousandths of an inch. Um, and that's good, but that does still leave lash, especially when you have it on both sides of this cradle. And so we pushed and pushed and pushed the boundaries of MJF and we got it down to pretty consistently, like four thousandths of an inch of tolerance. HP might want to do a case study on that because it's pretty cool. I think we're we're working with some pretty cool stuff. Um but yeah, that was the biggest challenge. And it's we haven't seen failures out in the field yet. Um, but again, we're very new. We just launched in March. We have uh a few users around the world using it right now, uh, and Dubai to kind of foster this relationship I have with TrueLims. Um they're our distributor in Middle East, North Africa, Egypt region, and uh now Dubai. And so we had people do simulated repairs and said, like, hey, okay, let's pretend your finger broke, right? We have someone out in West Texas using our hand. He's like eight hours or six hours from his nearest clinician. And he took a video and he repaired his own finger. We we told him, like, your pinky broke, what are you gonna do? And he replaced his own pinky in three minutes and 36 seconds, like flat. It was impressive. And yeah, that was that was the whole goal. It was it was this this field reparability or field service ability to not only, like you said, make sure that people have as much uptime as possible and they can do what they want to be doing, but clinicians don't have to spend that time um either trying to fix it themselves or sending the hand back to the manufacturer and them sending a loaner hand in the meantime and then switching that process backwards. Like that was just a nightmare for everyone when we first did these discovery calls, and that was that was the whole goal of what we seemingly have solved. But obviously, there's much more time left in our company, and we we may see things pop up that might need modification. But the cool thing is in one week's time we can make a change of the hand and we can push that change out.

Joris:

So and how did like the finance you manage, yeah, the CFO and stuff like that? How did the financial part of this go? Did you raise money early? Did you bootstrap it? How did you do that?

Ryan:

Oh, yeah, I was all bootstrapped. My girlfriend was paying my rent, my mom was paying for my food, and I was eating uh porridge pretty much for now. It was it was I I got some graduation money um from my family. I have a pretty large family, and I think it was like I think $2,000. And then we won my senior design team and I won uh $3,000, which I got $750 for. And then I started to GoFundMe, raise $3,000 that way, and that uh like $5,000, $6,000-ish was kind of the foundation of what I used for the first year to just exclusively buy all things related to prosthetics. Like 10% of that immediately went to like just one EQD. Um a lot more went to like sub subcomponents, like EMGs, uh, which are all pretty expensive. Like it was each of these things was like 10% of all that I had in funds. And then eventually you joined incubators or I joined incubators, accelerators, and we got small investments at first. So it was like I think we raised 50,000. Um, the next year we raised like 200,000. But yeah, it was it was investment that we had from. Very philanthropic investors, people who were invested in, which was very surprising to me. I thought I was gonna get just, you know, completely just bamboozled by these people who just want returns on investment, but that wasn't it. All of our investors, up until like the last couple of years, were very focused on just the mission, just helping people. And that was just, it's a beautiful thing. Like I'm still very grateful to all of them for believing and supporting in this. But yeah, it was an it was an investment uh for a long time and uh still is. We're going into another raise uh because we entered humanoid robotics, similar to psionic and a and I think there's one company called OiMotion who started in prosthetics and then went to humanoid robotics. But um, just a quick tangent on that. I think the beauty in that is that every advancement we makes towards humanoids goes into helping people, and every advancement makes towards helping people goes back into so it's this beautiful cross-pollination of technology. But back to the main point, sorry.

Joris:

No, no, I think it's a great idea. And then and also there'll be a lot of like motors and industrial motors and also just industrial automation stuff for robotics and end effectors and stuff. And it also has that same kind of like uh the cross-pollination, right?

Ryan:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Especially in terms of like functionality, because companies like Phantom Neuro, Blue Arbor Technologies, they're working on like individual finger control. And some hands out there aren't prepared for that. Like you need six degrees of freedom if you're gonna give people individual finger control, like at a minimum. And so future hands that we have planned for cumulative robotics have like higher degrees of freedom, abduction, adduction. And these are all things that we need to be considering as the world of prosthetics, especially in myelectrics, starts to improve and advance, like in ways that we couldn't imagine. So there's just a lot to consider with that. And yeah, it's it's really cool to see how what we're doing in prosthetics can help humanoids and the things we are building for humanoids will immediately go back into helping prosthetics.

Joris:

Okay. And another thing is like, okay, so what product-wise, like you could you know, start with that, we'll only do hands. You can move to other stuff, you could move to you know, having a half a dozen models of hands. What where where are you going kind of product trial? You want one product, a lineup, or what are you headed to?

Ryan:

We're gonna have uh an array of products basically. It's gonna be just hands though. I don't have any plans, at least in the near term, to go lower them. Those are just those are beautifully complex, and I haven't I haven't touched those. Um, but primarily because I I'm obsessed and fascinated with hands. I think I I I I go home and I honestly look at my hands when I do the dishes, when I pick up anything, when I flip a page in a book, it's just so many tiny details that I that I admire, but also that I think to myself, like, dang, like even my hands are failing. Like, I'll drop something and I'll be like, I didn't want to drop that, or I didn't I can't catch something because either my hands are not like uh sensitive enough or just something wrong, right? And so that's kind of why I want to stay focused on hands because I think they can be even better than our own, but how to do that is the challenge that just runs in my head every night.

Joris:

That's super cool. And yeah, you said already you want to make these things as cheap as phones. Do you have like a five-year plan kind of thing, or is it longer than that, or what are you looking for uh as a goal?

Ryan:

Yeah, so this round that we're raising, we're raising $11 million. Uh, hopefully before the end of this year. We've got a few good leads and bites, but in 12 to 18 months, this is our big plan or the big dream. 12 to 18 months, we will have four, three or four new hands on the market that will culminate in a just bleeding edge hand. Like I can't tell you too many details about what we're gonna be putting in it, but it will have immeasurable capabilities by comparison to what the hand currently has today. So it took us, I think what, three years from when we actually started engineering to develop or to catch up to like the bleeding edge of prosthetics. And now that we kind of know what we're gonna do, um, it took us 12 months to go from the Genesis hand to the surge hand, which is now used in robotics. And in the next 12 to 18, we want to have these other three hands. So affordability, and there's we'd like to make the distinction, like these aren't cheap. Like we don't, we do not sacrifice quality. Like that is the number one thing. Like you should come see our office. If you're ever in San Antonio, like I want to invite everyone to come see it, but quality is the name of the game with what we do, but affordability is what we want to make sure that we adhere to because adoption's everything, not just for helping people, but for humanoid robots as well. And if we find success in cumulative robotics, which is a by far hundred times X the size of the prosthetics market, then we can continue to subsidize these prosthetics and at no cost to us, right? And this is where the big dream of yeah, I want I want these things to be the price of a phone comes into play.

Joris:

Yeah, sounds really, really awesome, Ryan. Uh Ryan, thank you so much for being here today.

Ryan:

Yeah, thank you for having me. It was awesome to catch up with y'all.

Joris:

And uh, Brett, yeah, uh, I know you enjoy this. So then thanks for being here as well today.

Brent:

Yeah, this was great. And thanks, Ryan, for sharing your journey. And we look forward to uh potentially catching up here in the future as you're uh uh scaling this up. And uh yeah, I'm pretty excited to see what is next. And thank you for advocating for not only our field, but for those that are uh with upper extremity limb difference that's so important.

Ryan:

100%. My pleasure.

Joris:

Thank you very much for listening to another episode of the Percentic Travel Fox Podcast. Have a nice day.

Contributor

Brent Wright

Co-host
Contributor

Joris Peels

Co-host