A basketball hopeful wants to prevent ACL tears with knee airbags

You’ve heard of car airbags that deploy within milliseconds to protect passengers. What about your knee airbag?

That’s what basketball hopeful Kylin Shaw is working on with his startup, the Hippos Exoskeleton – a “knee sleeve” that measures pressure on the knee joint and inflates the knee to protect it from serious injuries like ACL and MCL tears. The sleeve inflates in 30 milliseconds, which the company says is faster than the 60 milliseconds required for ACL tears to occur.

“I, personally, loved basketball since I was six years old, and for the next ten years, it became my whole life,” Shaw told TechCrunch.

“I devoted myself to intense training… But when I was 17, while I was preparing for a professional basketball career and NCAA tryouts, I felt a sick pop in my knee when I was going down for a dunk,” he said.

The injury ended Shaw’s athletic career, but it gave him the idea to combine AI-driven sensors with a “knee bag.” He left the London School of Economics to develop it.

Hippos said the brace uses predictive AI to detect dangerous movements in real time and deploy airbags in the knee, potentially saving athletes thousands in medical costs.

Shaw and his co-founder Bhavy Metakar (CTO) started Hippo by investing $1,000 of their savings to prototype and pre-order from clinics and athletes. The startup has now raised a pre-seed round of $642,000 from investors Possible Ventures and Silicon Roundabout Ventures.

Shaw told Techcrunch that the company has already received “over six figures in pre-orders,” and will use the new funding to develop the product and move toward a full launch in about three months.

He said the unit will eventually cost about $129 and come with a $29/month to $99/month subscription plan that includes AI-driven data, tiny air cans, and workout tracking.

The startup has conducted trials with UK football clubs and famous athletes, such as world champion skier Alex Schlopy of the US Ski Team. In a statement, Schlopy said: “I was impressed with the prevention work and it felt so easy and comfortable! This walking bag makes me feel mentally safe.”

Aside from elite athletes, Shaw said the product can be used to prevent injuries in anyone, such as construction workers or the elderly.

Hippos may be pushing through the open door. Although approximately 150,000 ACL injuries are reported in the United States each year, and 8.6 million worldwide among adults, those numbers do not include injuries in children. Also, many health solutions focus on rehabilitation rather than prevention.

In addition, existing companies dealing with sports joint protection and rehabilitation focus on traditional support devices or post-injury support.

Products in this space include Enovis’ DonJoy (straps and orthopedic supports), ExoKinetics’ Zeen (specially rehabilitation devices), and Shock Doctor (sports braces and protective gear for injury management). None of these solutions offer the predictive or active technology that the Hippos air-bag does.

Also participating in the round were Huggingface founder and CSO, Thomas Wolf; Wayve’s founder Amar Shah, and Dr. James Brown, UK Athletics’ leading sports medicine physician.