We had a version that was carbon fiber like this, and then we had a version that we vinyl wrapped so it look like his hand. To our surprise, he said that he actually preferred the black bionic look. And his reason was he said that when he walks down the street with the bionic hand, he feels like Robocop. And we realized that it's because it gives him ownership of that narrative, right? That this isn't something to be afraid of, it's not something to be pitied.

This is something for him to be proud of. He was a national war hero, right? That's how he lost his hand. It gives him that sense of pride and confidence when he goes out that he doesn't have to really worry about like, what are people going to think because they see this and they're like, you have a bionic hand? That's that's so super cool.

Brian Heater (00:50)

Hey everybody, it's Brian Heater back with another episode of Automated from A3. We have a very special one for you this week. I actually saw Adeel Akhtar give a talk at an event in London over the summer and was so impressed with Psionic's mission statement that I asked him to appear at our upcoming Humanoid Robotics Forum in Seattle in September. We'll get into why a prosthetic hand company is a good fit for a Humanoid event.

During this conversation, we also asked him to share his psionic experiences on this week show to give some insight into how companies are creating technologies that can actually change the world for the better. It's an inspiring chat. I hope you enjoy. Before this, I was at TechCrunch for a while and you know, we got a lot of pitches and it's clear that a part of the conversations that happen or the trading is to.

to tell the VC or the Shark Tank host or whoever you're pitching to about your journey. And you've got a really good one and it started a long time ago. And I'm wondering if it was really as much of a straight shot as it sounds like.

Aadeel Akhtar (02:02)

Yeah, I mean, it was definitely like very circuitous, right? Because my original plan was to become a medical doctor. So the goal was always to work with people with limb differences, right? So people missing a limb in the prosthetic space in particular. so that's ever since I was seven years old, that's what I wanted to do. The question was always, what is the best way to do that, right? When I went to Loyola University Chicago for undergrad, I was a pre-med student and the goal was to become a medical doctor that worked with people missing limbs. It wasn't until my sophomore year of undergrad that I took my first computer science class and I loved it. And I realized that if I become a straight up MD, I don't get to do any of the cool stuff that I was learning in my engineering classes. So I wanted to figure out a way to combine that. And that's really where this...thrust into bionics came about in particular. And right down the street, there was a hospital, it's now called the Shirley Ron ability lab. It was the rehabilitation Institute of Chicago before then. And they had these incredible breakthroughs in these mind controlled bionic limbs that were controlled by like your nerves and they were doing surgeries. And that was kind of what spurred me on a slightly different path that combining engineering and medicine.

And then I went on a trip to Ecuador during my PhD and met a patient who controlled a very early prototype of our hand for the very first time. And that made me realize that a startup or a company was the best way to make the most impact in the world as opposed to going through academia.

Brian Heater (03:35)

to back up much further. So it ? was a trip to Pakistan that really got you on that secretive route.

Aadeel Akhtar (03:42)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so ? I was born in Chicago. My parents are from ? Karachi in Pakistan. And that's where I was visiting when I was seven. And that was the first time I met someone missing a limb. She was my age, missing her right leg and using a tree branch as a crutch. And that's what inspired me to want to work in this field in particular, in making limbs for people and.

Brian Heater (04:01)

not robots. That's an interesting part of that story as well. The fact that she was using a tree branch would lead me to believe that they weren't a family of means that they, you know, probably didn't have the resources to spend a lot of money on prosthesis. So how much of that was a part of the initial goal for the company is really driving the price down and making it as accessible as possible.

Aadeel Akhtar (04:26)

Yeah, that was definitely in our lifeblood since the beginning as well too, because we knew that accessibility was an issue for devices, especially advanced devices like the ones that we build. From the beginning, even before the company was even founded, so we founded the company in 2015 while I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois.

But a year before we founded the company, we started working with a nonprofit organization called the Range of Motion Project. And their mission is to provide prosthetics to those who can't afford them, primarily in Guatemala and Ecuador. Their mission had really resonated with me because it reminded me of when I was seven years old and I was visiting that girl in Pakistan for the very first time and she couldn't afford a prosthetic limb. She was living in poverty. And here was a nonprofit organization that was doing something to actually change that inequality.

around the world, starting with Latin America and then eventually expanding worldwide. One of the co-founders and the former executive director of the Range of Motion Project, David Krupa, he's an alum from the University of Illinois, and that's how he got in contact. And that just really resonated with us that we're building these 3D printed prosthetic hands that were super low cost to build. ? And we wanted to be able to make these things ? accessible to as many people as possible.

Brian Heater (05:46)

Again, as you said earlier, maybe computer scientists and roboticists were not necessarily on your life goal to start out with. And I assume that until like relatively recently, I guess a decade or so ago, ? C level executive probably wasn't like that high on your list either. Is that fair to say?

Aadeel Akhtar (06:08)

It's totally fair to say. ? was the route that even 10 years ago, the route that I was originally planning at that point was I was in an MD PhD program. So my PhD was in ? Neuroscience, but I have a master's in Electrical and Computer Engineering. But the idea would be that I would work at an academic hospital and ? have my own lab, like an academic lab at the hospital where I'd see patients once a week.

people with limb differences. And then the rest of the week, we would build devices like this, where we would test them on potential patients. And it was the Ecuador trip that I was mentioning that when we made that in 2014, the user who tried our prosthetic hand for the very first time. Internally, we call that version of the hand Mark II was the second version of the Ability Hand. There's three times the size of an average adult human hand. Wires going everywhere, pulling the breadboards, power supplies, the wall, you name it. And Juan, our very first patient ever, he told us that he made a pinch with his left hand for the first time in 35 years and that he felt as though a part of him had come back.

And that's when I realized that if I stay in academia, this just ends up as a journal paper. And if we want everyone to feel the same way that Juan did, we had to commercialize this tech. And the way my wife puts it is that ? I went down on that trip as a medical student and I came back as a CEO.

Brian Heater (07:35)

Yeah, I heard you because you we met at the humanoid summit in London a couple of weeks ago and I heard you tell the pinch story and I'm curious if you get a sense of why it was that gesture specifically that really resonated with him.

Aadeel Akhtar (07:51)

I think it's because, so one, that was one of the pre-programmed grips that we had in the hand, right? So we had a machine learning and AI algorithm that would detect his muscle signals and then use that to generate ? the movements that we would have in the hand for these pre-programmed grips. So basically imagine this, the training session takes about like two minutes and the hand would do different grips. So it'd hold like a fist, it would make a pinch, it would do like a lateral grasp, it would do like a tripod grip.

And then the user is tasked with mimicking those same movements for about like 15 seconds each that trains the AI algorithm to learn those muscle patterns associated with those grips. And then after those two minutes, the next time you try making that grip, the AI algorithm says, ? these muscle patterns look like the ones that you tried to make a pinch with, and we're going to make the hand do the same thing. And so when...we asked him to do this training procedure and he was trying to make a pinch. He actually didn't remember how to because it had been 35 years and he was like, I don't know exactly how to make a pinch with this hand anymore on this side because it was using muscles that he hadn't really used before like in 35 years.

What we did is we actually did mirror therapy where we took a mirror and we placed it in front of his amputated side, reflecting his right hand, tricking his brain into thinking that his left hand was there. And so when he tried making a pinch now with both sides, it reactivated his muscles and it was a unique enough muscle signal that the AI algorithm was able to detect that it was him trying to make a pinch. And then he was able to effectively do that on the prosthetic hand. for him,

It was almost like he reawakened this ability that he didn't have anymore, that he thought he didn't have anymore from 35 years prior.

Brian Heater (09:47)

Yeah, those are my favorite science things when it's something that like I would have come up with when I was five years old, like tricking the brain with the mirror. Like it's incredible that that works. Right? I mean, I'm that like a big part of your work just generally both as a medical doctor and what you're doing now is connected to neurology. Is that fair to say?

Aadeel Akhtar (10:09)

Yeah, absolutely.  I will contend that I did end up dropping out of medical school to run the psionic full time. I did finish the PhD, but my family, they looked down on me for not having finished that medical degree. I'm just kidding.

Brian Heater (10:26)

I mean, you know, like I've heard stories like that. It's like even if you're successful in another field, you know, they had like a very specific idea of what path they want you to

Aadeel Akhtar (10:35)

I will say my parents did want me and both of my older brothers to all get medical degrees and none of us did but I did come the closest. I was actually in medical school.

Brian Heater (10:47)

Yeah, that's that's that's funny. So that trip that you took to Pakistan, do you feel like they were kind of like pushing you in that direction at that early age?

Aadeel Akhtar (10:55)

I think they were pushing me in that direction since I was born, like even before was seven years old. ?

Brian Heater (11:02)

The transition to executive is interesting because, you know, I've been covering robotics specifically for several years now. And there's a lot of stories of technical founders, you know, people who start in the lab, who started research universities, they spin out, they're the CEO or even like CTO at the time. And then once the company really matures and they kind of bring the ringers in, right, they bring like the executive executives in how much of a learning curve has this process been for you?

Aadeel Akhtar (11:34)

Yeah,I mean, it was definitely a huge learning curve because I mean, it was basically at the beginning to is learning how to speak a different language entirely. Right. ? And one of the the things that helped in that journey to is that coming from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I mean, there's a long history of commercialization that came out of there, right? Like YouTube was created there. ? A lot of the like the some of the PayPal founders came from there as well, too.

They had a really good infrastructure on how to take engineering and turn it into a startup and a company. They have an incubator space over there at Enterprise Works. They've got an accelerator program that's now world renowned as well, too, the iVenture Accelerator. And we participated in all of those programs. And ? that really helped us to learn the lean startup methodology like Steve Blank stuff and ? customer discovery and testing our hypotheses and ROI and like building on a business plan and putting together a pitch deck. And those are all new concepts to me because we, coming from an engineering background, coming from a medical background, you don't do any of that stuff.

Brian Heater (12:50)

Yeah, feel like pitch decks maybe aren't that far from like a school assignment, right? But obviously it's a very

Aadeel Akhtar (12:55)

Sure. gonna have like an LTV over CAC in a school assignment though, right?

Brian Heater (13:03)

I guess it depends on what you're studying. yeah, that's fair. That's fair. What is is I'm not familiar with the lean method is, is that just start small and stay small?

Aadeel Akhtar (13:11)

It's definitely very focused around just customer discovery, right? Like getting out of the lab, going out there and talking to as many end users as possible before you really start to build so that you know that what you're building will have the product market fit that needs. And it challenged a lot of our early assumptions right off the bat. And so one of the things I mentioned earlier was that when we started, we fully 3D printed the hand, right? And if you're ever out in our offices in San Diego, In the lobby, we've got every single generation of our hands since 2014 that we've developed. And the first four are all fully 3D printed. And it was around 2015, 2016 that we started doing this customer discovery process. And we started talking with as many end users of the hand as possible, as many clinicians as possible. And the number one thing they complained about which we thought would be the price. you know, these bionic hands are like $50,000 to like $100,000. It wasn't the price. It was that their 50 to $100,000 hand was breaking within a month of them using it or a couple months of them using it. It wasn't because they were doing anything crazy, but they would accidentally like hit their hand against the side of a table. And because they were made out of these rigid components, they would just snap at the joints, but your own fingers, your own natural fingers, if you hit it, has...appliance that has flexibility, by the way, it comes back without so that it doesn't snap at the joints. And we were like, if we give someone a 3D printed hand, they're going to break this thing within like a minute of using it. So how could we still leverage the low cost of 3D printing, but still have this hand be more robust than anything else that's out there? There was a lot of work being done, especially at the Yale Grab Labs or Dollars Group out there on soft robotics in particular. And they had this beautiful video, this hand that they had created called the I-High hand. It was like a three finger grasper, right? That was tendon driven, but it was using these molded soft components. And they were holding this baseball and they grabbed the baseball and they took a baseball bat and they just swung it and just launched the baseball out of these fingers, right? And this whole thing is happening in a split second, less than 500 milliseconds. So When you look at the video in real time, it's just like, okay, you're just like knocking it out and the hands are working fine. But then they put it in slow motion and you see the fingers just like wildly like moving about and then like immediately getting back to its original position. And I was like, that, that is the kind of technology that is crucial to the prosthetic side and eventually the robotic side as well too. mean, there's already on the robotic side for them.

And if the number one problem is robustness, well, then let's incorporate these soft robotics components in the hand. And so we developed our own compliant four bar linkage. And so if you see on the fingers here, they're flexible, right? So I can take this and can smash it. totally survived the impact. And I can even pop the hand off. It survives that too. I've stepped on it, put it in a dryer for 10 minutes. I've arm wrestled the paratriathlete national champion in loss. It pops back on in the socket and it'll recalibrate. Like nothing happened at all. Right. And by staying lean, I mean, we could have been developing these like hardcore 3D printed hands for years and then find out when we actually bring it to the market that, we're not going to sell any of these hands because they're going to break all the time. But by going through that lean methodology and this customer discovery process, we found that product market fit earlier on. And that helped significantly accelerate our timelines.

Brian Heater (16:56)

Yeah, are so I mean you made it sound like you're still using 3D printing in some respect I see for prototyping but are there any 3D printed parts on the hand.

Aadeel Akhtar(17:06)

There are actually, and so a lot of the internals are still 3D printed. So there's like a flexible 3D printed bone inside the fingers. The palms are 3D printed, but we'll always like reinforce them with materials that are more resilient, right? So we have silicone over the fingers and then we've got carbon fiber. So this is actual carbon fiber that reinforces the palms. And that's why it's able to withstand all these blunt force impacts and stresses and strains.

Brian Heater (17:33)

So aside from costs, we'll come back to that, but the other obvious benefit of 3D printing is a level of customization that you can do. Obviously, not everybody has the same size hand, not everybody has the same size arm. How much customization are you actually able to do for these hands?

Aadeel Akhtar (17:49)

Yeah, so we've got two sizes. So there's a small and a large and the smallest 50th percentile adult female size, largest 50th percentile adult male size. The biggest difference being really the just like the thickness and the lengths of the fingers in particular. We've got a right and a left obviously too. But one of the big things for us is that we do want to be able to scale this, right? And that's what we've been doing for the last couple of years is just getting as many hands out there as possible, building as many hands as possible as well too.

And so while 3D printing can lean itself to that customization, what it also can do is it can do very complicated parts on the internal features that you can't really do from a subtractive manufacturing method, like machining, for example, while still also reducing the costs significantly. And so we're still using a lot of those techniques. eventually, mean, especially as the robotics sector is really exploding as well, too.

I mean, we're going to switch to probably more ? advanced mass manufacturing techniques as well, too, like going to like injection molded materials and other techniques like that, too.

Brian Heater (18:56) So the price point, the last I heard the price point is kind of somewhere between 10 and 20 K.

Aadeel Akhtar (19:02)

Right.

Yep, yep, yep. So it's between 10 and 20K. And honestly, as we're seeing a lot of these volumes increase, especially on the humanoid robot side, for example, I can see this eventually going sub-5,000 per hand.

Brian Heater (19:18)

obviously like a fraction of the price of what previous prosthetic hands had cost, but still, you know, at 10 to 20, still like maybe prohibitively expensive for some people, even like five may be prohibitively expensive for the, you know, the little girl that you mentioned at the top. One of the

Really, to me, one of the really exciting things in and around robotics right now is a lot of the open sourcing that's happening. And that's something that can certainly be afforded with 3D printing, right? It's giving people access to these things. that an avenue that you're involved in or exploring at all?

Aadeel Akhtar (19:55)

I mean, we've definitely open sourced several of our previous designs as well, too. And especially the ones that were like more 3D printed because those are accessible to a lot of people. The only caveat being, again, that if robustness is one of the key features there, that's one of the things you lose out on. And that's why in our heads, it's really like a volume game to kind of push down the prices and the cost. Now, that being said.

I mean, on the prosthetic side in the US, it's covered by like Medicare. So the end user isn't paying 10 to $20,000 for that, right? They're paying whatever their copay is. That could be like, you know, if they've met their premium, then it's free if the or a couple like 102,000, a couple thousand bucks, right? Then like you're saying, right? I mean, if we're going to developing nations and even like a $5,000 hand, that's still going to be really expensive. And so we've got initiatives that we started. have a program called the ability fund that's in partnership with the range of motion project. And for that program, every 25K that's donated completely covers all of the clinical services and the hand to a potential user, but also will donate a leg to someone in Guatemala or Ecuador. So it's an arm and a leg for $25,000, which is like one fifth of the price of what those services would actually be. So I think what we'll be seeing in the next five to 10 years is that a lot of those prices are going to be dropping down even further as well too. And to the point where Medicaid in the US might even cover a hand. So if you're uninsured, then you can get on Medicaid and cover the hand. And initiatives that can help subsidize these hands and other limbs that we're working on ? in developing nations will be much more prevalent and much more easy to access.

Brian Heater (21:37)

The leg that you're donating, is that something that was created in-house?

Aadeel Akhtar (21:41)

Not yet. So we haven't finished that one yet. So that's just existing legs from other companies, but eventually.

Brian Heater (21:49)

Okay, so when we look at your roadmap, that's kind of the next big point for you to hit is the leg.

Aadeel Akhtar (21:54)

We're already working on a wrist and an elbow as well too, but then a knee and an ankle is in the pipeline for sure.

Brian Heater (22:00)

Obviously, a doesn't require the same kind of dexterity that you need with a hand, but I assume that that presents its own challenges.

Aadeel Akhtar (22:08)

Yeah, you know, it's kind of an inverse problem where you don't need as much dexterity, you don't need as many motors, but what you do need is stability. need to make sure that your human user or your robot is never going to fall, right? Because ? that just, ? it can damage other parts of the body as well too. so...

your control systems for lower limbs need to be able to account for like stumble recovery and things like that, which you don't necessarily need to do in a dexterous hand, but a dexterous hand needs to be dexterous, right? So it's kind of an inverse problem.

Brian Heater (22:44)

Yeah, this is kind of a this is an under discussed issue with humanoid robots themselves, you the fact that they have to be powered on in order to stand that that that is, it's a really difficult problem solved. You know, it surprises me that the part of I guess, the early exploration was looking for the market fit, because for me, at least, it seems obvious, right? I mean, unlike other companies, unlike a lot of other robotic companies, you're not

Aadeel Akhtar (22:55)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brian Heater (23:10)

using a technology and backwards engineering yourself into a problem. It's very clear that there's a market for this, but did that still take some convincing in terms of the discussions with VCs?

Aadeel Akhtar (23:21)

That's an interesting question. I think more so it was more along the lines that I was a first time founder, that's my first time raising money. And you'll probably hear every founder say this, that is the hardest time to raise money is the first time. And then every time you do afterwards, it's way easier. Particularly because you've grown the networks, you've done it before, you know exactly what the questions are going to be.

how to answer them.  so I think that was the harder part about raising our first round was just doing it for the very first time.  The technology was always kind of exciting. And we always had kind of that storytelling aspect all along, right mean, the company was born because of that Ecuador trip that I had gone on where Juan had made a pinch for the first time. And so the storytelling aspect was always there. one of the things that was difficult  convince a lot of investors to come on board too is just the market size for prosthetics is much smaller than especially if we're comparing it to the robotic side in particular  the growth of the robotic side is also so much faster right now than the growth of the  prosthetic side in particular. And I would say the prosthetics growth is probably very linear, whereas the robotic side is kind of like exponential right now.

But because of that small market size, it's also a very neglected  market as well too. And so we saw all these people with limb differences not getting the latest and greatest technology that they should ? be able to get. And so we wanted to jump in on that. And so we had like a lot of success with angel investors and kind of like more on the impact side of things. So a lot of ? medical doctors coming in because they deal with you know, people with disabilities or people with illnesses all the time so they understand the need. And so that was kind of how we raised our first round was a lot through more so the angel investing route and the kind of like the impact investors.

Brian Heater (25:36)

Was it that conversation about market size that drove you into the humanoid market?

Aadeel Akhtar (25:42)

Partially, it was more so that ? I came from a robotics lab. I was doing my PhD. was in the lab of Professor Tim Brett Alton. So he's a roboticist that came from Stanford and Caltech. And when we approached a lot of these problems, because of the lab that we were in, we approached them from a robotics context. And we would routinely go to robotics conferences and work with other professors in the space too. we had an idea of what the needs were from the academics and the robotics space. there was a, I mean, right off the bat, like ? when we did our ? nationwide launch, I think that's when we posted a video on LinkedIn and Meta had contacted us about getting a hand for some of the projects that they're working on that they've open sourced now as well too with some of their Llama models. ? but I went to a, I was giving a talk at Georgia Tech.

And  the program director of their Institute for Robotics, IREM at the time, Professor Seth Hutchinson, ? he was meeting with me and he was telling me that, you know, if you bring this hand to ICRA, which is one of the robotics conferences or IROS is one of those two. He was like, all of the professors in the nation are going to like watch your hand. And I was like, OK, so we got an exhibit booth at IROS.

And he was not wrong. Like we were just swarmed with all these people who were like, wow, you guys have an API for this. You can do like position control, velocity control. We can stream the touch sensors over like Bluetooth and like I squared C and UART and RS485. And the thing is we put those features in there because we figured that academic researchers on both like the bioengineering side, but also on the robotics side would be interested in this hand.

And kind of in going through that process, when NASA got our hand that they put on their human astronaut robot, Valkyrie, we had gone down there like a couple of years ago and we brought one of our users with us and they were showing us that Valkyrie was struggling with doing like a zipper that was on the wall. It was a zipper that you'd find on like the International Space Station and they were trying to do that zipper with a pinch, right? So you like pinch the zipper and you try to move it. But the thing is, that if you, if you

carefully think about how we actually interact with zippers. The majority of the time we're actually using a lateral grasp, right? So not necessarily a pinch where the tips of your index and the thumb are meeting, but rather the thumb is on the side of the index finger because that gives you more surface area and a lot more strength to hold onto that zipper. And so we do the same thing with our hand, right? Where you can do like a lateral grasp just like that, and you can hold the zipper in between here.

And so our user experience specialist, Anika, who uses our hand, she was with us and she goes up to the zipper and she did a lateral grasp and easily did this. And the NASA engineers were like, we didn't even think about using the hand in that way. And there's this really interesting translation then that happens between our human users and the robotics users as well, where if you're building a robot to do human tasks, it makes sense to use a hand that the human users have already been using to do those exact same tasks.

And it's the same hand that goes on the robots that goes on the humans.

Brian Heater (29:06)

That outside of I get obviously like these really ? these wonderful stories that you have about, you know, people learning to reuse their hands or use their hands for the first time. Getting a room full of NASA scientists to like be in awe of you has has to have been one of the most edifying moments of your career.

Aadeel Akhtar(29:27)

You know, on that trip in particular, we took our kids out of school. So I a currently a nine and a seven year old. And so this is two years ago and they were seven and five. And I was just like, it's not every day that we get to go to NASA and see a humanoid robot that on top of that has our hand on it. So for them to get to witness that, I'm just thinking like, if I were five years old and I got to see this, that would be like a life changing event for me. And I hope. that that's something that sticks with them forever ? as kind of like one of those inspirational life-changing moments for them too. Because even your

Brian Heater (30:03)

Dad points just went out to that point. Was Valkyrie what initially led to the partnership with Aptronic?

Aadeel Akhtar (30:07)

Definitely.

So I think we first met them at Iros, actually. ? So they stopped by our booth and I think as they saw the hand and they saw some of the features of it too, and then probably when they saw it on Valkyrie as well too, I think it was just a ? lot of things coming together at the same time. We were like, okay, let's try these hands out. And we kept working with them and working with them. We were able to do ? a lot more with them as it went along that.

? Yeah, I think it was just a combination of just a lot of factors.

Brian Heater (30:48)

You probably noticed this as well, know, the first several industrial humanoid robotics companies were all trying to do full stack, right? Everything for themselves. A big part of that is because a lot of the things that they needed just didn't exist. But it seems like there's been a shift. It seems like these companies are now more willing to work with third parties, if it makes sense.

Aadeel Akhtar (31:10)

Yeah, honestly, feel like I feel like it's kind of both. ? and because I mean, it depends on like, you know, like one X and figure they're all developing their own hands. ? And and then but there's a lot of other companies that are just building like the rest of it, right? They're putting robot arms on like a torso and then they attach an end effector to it. And there's advantages and disadvantages to both. ? And at the Humanoid Summit, ? we were talking about that on the kind of like the the dexterous hand panel as well too, right? That one of the advantages of not building your own hand is that then you've got the ability to choose whatever hand that you want, whatever end effector you want, right? And at some level, you know, that's kind of like the approach that like persona is taking from a humanoid level in general, right? Where you have a different persona for the task that you are trying to do, whether you're modularity. Exactly, modularity. And that's kind of cool, right? Because I can pop this off. This is extremely modular. You can pop this on. I can take this off the NASA robot and put it on a human user or put it on our unitry humanoid or put it on our robot dog, et cetera. And then it works in every single one of those contexts. And that modularity has a lot of benefits for sure.

Brian Heater (32:31)

Yeah, another thing that, you I guess seems obvious on the face of it is this. You talked about it on that panel and I've heard a lot of ? like Melanie Weiss has talked about her perspective on this too, is the. There's been the other shift that's been happening that I've been seeing in humanoids is this conversation around like super humanoids, which is, you know, if. There are a lot of tasks that maybe humans aren't the best equipped for.

And one of the more interesting things, I think it was the guy from Shadow Robotics who said, somebody approached us about a 12-fingered hand. They showed us why it makes sense, and we made that 12-fingered hand. Is that on the roadmap? kind of using the hands as foundation, but moving beyond it, in a sense, something that you're working on?

Aadeel Akhtar (33:22)

For us, we found that anthropomorphism ? has been really beneficial in multiple contexts. ? one, if we're looking at the human side of things, for example, right? I'm sure you're aware of like the uncanny valley, for example, right? So like the most prevalent prosthesis, hand prosthesis in the world is a hook, right? Because it's just two steel pincers.

Brian Heater (33:43)

that you get to replicate a human the creepier it becomes.

Aadeel Akhtar (33:46)

Exactly. But also on the other side of the spectrum, it's not human-like at all, then it's also creepy, right? ? So the hooks, for example, are not viewed as favorably from a social context, right? But if you have a hand that looks extremely real, that is also very creepy. And Juan, our very first ? user of the Ability Hand, the one in Ecuador that made a pinch for the first time.

We had made several trips back to Ecuador after that and we had ? two different versions of the hand that we brought down with Mark 8 of the Ability Hand. This is Mark 9.5. When we initially went down, we had Mark 2 just for some context. But with Mark 8, we had a version that was carbon fiber like this and then we had a version that we vinyl wrapped to match his skin tone and we dyed like the silicone finger so it would look like his hand. To our surprise, he said that he actually preferred the black bionic look.

And his reason was, was he said that because when he walks down the street with the bionic hand, he feels like Robocop. so we realized that it's because it gives him ownership of that narrative, right? That this isn't something to be like afraid of. It's not something to be pitied. This is something for him to be proud of. He was a national war hero, right? That's how he lost his hand. It gives him that sense of.

pride and confidence when he goes out that he doesn't have to really worry about like, what are people going to think because they see this and they're like, you have a bionic hand that's so super cool, right? And on the robotic side, the thing is if we're translating data from human hands to a robotic hand, then it's a lot easier to do if you stick with the anthropomorphic form factor. Now that being said, within that anthropomorphic form factor,

Can you have superhuman abilities? Absolutely, right? mean, our human users have done 360 degrees of wrist rotation. They charge their phones from their arms, right? Like there's all these different like superhuman abilities. You can imagine like we could like put really strong motors in there and then you can have like superhuman like pinch strength or like grip forces. And on the robotic side, you can use those for tasks that weren't necessarily deemed possible.

Again, the tricky part that you run into is when you're training those particular tasks to happen, then if it is superhuman, then it is harder to get the training data for it.

Brian Heater (36:10)

In what sense?

Aadeel Akhtar (36:12)

So if you're trying to do a superhuman grip strength, but you can't do the superhuman grip strength that the hand can do, how do you train it to do the superhuman grip strength?

Brian Heater (36:22)

because there aren't existing examples.

Aadeel Akhtar (36:24)

Exactly.

Brian Heater (36:26)

Yeah, this, this, you know, it strikes me that this is, it's a, I guess, a form of what you would call privilege. And this gets back to this, this idea of going and really serving people, talking about what they're looking for and, you know, changing some of your own expectations is I would assume that people wouldn't want to draw attention to it, right? That they would want to just like, to blend in and not make it stand out. But obviously, you know, we're seeing these like the Iron Man 3D printed robot hands. So, you know, in a very interesting way, like it can be a source of pride.

Aadeel Akhtar (37:08)

Absolutely. ? And I feel like in the last 10 years, there's been a shift towards that, especially just with a lot of the media that we see from science fiction, like Marvel movies like ? Bucky Barnes and Iron Man ? and all the people who have bionic exoskeletons or prostheses in these movies where it's now the really cool thing. ?

That has really changed that kind of narrative from a lot of people who want to hide their limbs to them wanting to show it off.

Brian Heater (37:46)

Yeah, obviously you're in San Diego, but beyond that, how do you get involved with Comic-Con? Why did Comic-Con make sense as a venue for Psyonik?

Aadeel Akhtar (37:58)

First of all, it's one of the top science fiction events, I would say, in the world. I mean, that's where Marvel movies are announced. That's where we found out that Robert Downey Jr. was going to be the next villain in Dr. Doom last year. It has a lot to do with us moving to San Diego, too. We moved to San Diego for many reasons, working with the military hospital. ? Then there's only three big ones in the US.

I'm working with the Challenge Athletes Foundation, the UCSD is a great engineering school where I'm an affiliate faculty member there as well too. We've got the inter... Yeah, the fish tacos, the perfect weather every day too that didn't hurt the ocean 15 minutes away. ? One of the things is a lot of the conferences run through there as well. So lot of the academic conferences, a lot of the medical conferences, it's a big biotech hub around here too, but...

Brian Heater (38:32)

Fish tacos.

Aadeel Akhtar (38:50)

San Diego Comic Con is one of the premier events for science fiction, but everyone has seen what ? these hands and bionic limbs look like in the movies, right? But no one knows what they're like in real life. What can they do? What can't they do? What are the limitations? What are the superhuman abilities that our users are able to do? And so our panel that we run every year called Bionic Arms in the Real World,

It has like five or six of our users on the panel that I moderate and they just talk about their experience in having a limb difference and how they use their hand in their daily lives. And it's just really, really cool to see the audience just resonate with that on like, A, at some level, science fiction becoming a reality, but B, how ? reality is actually informing science fiction in that sense too, because now they have a better sense of what people are capable of. with bionic limbs.

Brian Heater (39:47)

So obviously appearing at these events is a big part of what you're doing. You're flying around. And like I said, I you in London. You and I will be hanging out in Seattle towards the end of September. I'm always impressed. Like I'm pretty good at moderating panels, but I don't know that I could just stand up there and give a presentation for like 30 to 40 minutes. And that that's a learned skill. There had to be like a pretty steep learning curve there. A lot of visual aids, which I assume.Aadeel Ahktar (40:13)

I've always been...

That is true. We're a very media heavy company and that was done very purposefully from the beginning because we always wanted to show things that our hands can do that no one's really ever seen before. And so we have things like arm wrestling against a bionic hand, flaming board breaking, like bottle flip tricks. But presenting and storytelling has always been something that I've been doing ever since I was a kid.

And like you said, like school presentations and things like that. Like I was always giving those and I always enjoyed giving those in particular and just seeing what resonated with the audiences and what didn't. But I mean, even getting the presentation to the point where it's been now, I mean, it's gone through like probably more than 100 iterations of me giving that talk and like figuring out what works, what doesn't work, getting new content. And then like, how do we work that new content in? And ?

I mean, things change so rapidly in this industry. It's one of the things that's most exciting about it. ? That it really lends itself well to when we give these talks, when you give these presentations, it's like, what's the new thing? And then you see this new cool thing that the robots are doing that, again, you didn't know was possible before. ? That it really just keeps driving this journey.

from being a young kid to now and what the future is gonna hold for the next five to 10 years forward so that we can continue to tell that story.

Brian Heater (41:48)

Yeah, I'm guessing in terms of nerves, the humanoid robot form is probably nothing compared to going on shark tank. Is that fair?

Aadeel Akhtar (41:58)

Probably, probably.

Brian Heater (42:00)

that experience like, know, how I guess essential was that for you as far as some of the struggles that we alluded to as far as getting funding in the early days?

Aadeel Akhtar (42:10)

It's interesting because we were in the middle of an equity crowdfunding raise at the time. And after we had hit like a million in the equity crowdfunding raise on Start Engine, were approached by, we were called by like ABC and they were like, hey, are you interested in Shark Tank? And we were like, wow, that's crazy. The thing is, is that honestly, it was very much like a normal pitch that I would give to VCs. It was just on camera, right?

And because again, we've done it so many times before, like with just VCs and investors over the many years, a lot of the things that they were asking were just standard questions for us. that wasn't really the hard part. that being said, I mean, it was exhilarating, but it was also nerve wracking at the very same time, right? Our phones ended up like blowing up or like our emails blew up and it really just like...

put us on everyone's radars. And we've had a couple of events like that, like almost like on an annual basis where there's some like huge like media thing that that kind of happens. And the previous year we were featured on like the Hacksmith. So the Hacksmith is a big YouTuber from Canada that's always making like comic book stuff like real, right? Like how do you make like Captain America's shield or Thor's hammer and things like that.

And he flew over and he did a video with us and then that got over a million views. And then he did another video with us where he took our hand and designed it to look like a video game for a streamer who lives in London who was actually with me at the Humanoid Summit in particular. And that had over four million views on YouTube and then Shark Tank happened. And then earlier this year MKBHD featured our hand and so that has 2.4 million views as well too. We've got a couple other things happening later this year.

as well too that are going to be coming out soon as well. it's just like by staying constantly on these like high profile media, we're staying in the consciousness as well of just like the general public, honestly, make it more accessible in a way too, because the number of emails and that we get from people who are like, I just saw your hand on this, I know someone who's missing a hand that could use it, or I am building a robot and I want to put your hands on it to do X, Y, Z. It's, constantly happening now.

Brian Heater (44:35)

Like roughly what percentage of your job is basically doing media?

Aadeel Akhtar (44:42)

I feel like it changes every month, essentially. my job as well as I'm sure this is what a lot of startup CEOs would say too, is to fill in the gaps of what the company needs at that time, right? ?

And some months it might be like, you know, it's like 50 % of my time is on just like on media stuff. Other months, it might be like 10%. Other months, it might be like 80%. It all depends on like the season. It all depends on like what we've got going on. Like if it's like a really high profile person, then then obviously that's going to take like a lot more precedence. But January, we're at CES every year. In March, we're at South by Southwest. So we know those times are always going to be at those events. But at the same time, you know, we're

running the company, we're scaling it where we grew from seven people in San Diego a couple of years ago to now 45 people and we're growing even more as well too. ? So yeah, it changes from day to day. And again, it's one of the most exhilarating things is that there's never a boring day.

Brian Heater (45:48) Yeah, I assume there are some days though that you want to kind of, you know, roll up the blazer sleeves and like, you know, get deep into code or, you know, stand like with the do some work with the hardware team is are there still opportunities to get involved at that level for you?

Aadeel Akhtar (46:04)

for sure. For sure. Yeah, I mean, it's still only 45 people, right? I mean, I like I'm interacting with the engineering team ? all the time ? as well. So there's definitely that's one of the the beauties of being in a startup, too, is everything is just so cross functional that everyone's always wearing many hats. Right. I mean, we've got people on our media team, like always working with the engineers and vice versa. And like the sales team and

? We're all very cohesive and very cross-disciplinary.

Brian Heater (46:35)

In hindsight, was crowdfunding the right move for you?

Aadeel Akhtar (46:39)

I think it went very successfully for us. think ? there were many reasons why we did it. And we were also very, very hesitant ? to do it when we decided to. So I think we started that crowd fundraise towards the end of 2022. And if you recall at that time, ? was still in COVID times. ? The market ? had just turned from like

the best time for people to invest to like the worst time ever. And I remember reading a Wall Street Journal article saying like, this is the worst time to invest in the history of like humankind. And I was like, okay, so if we go after VCs at this point, it's going to not necessarily give us the best terms in particular. And we had done a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo like back in 2017. And we're, their goal was to raise, I think like 150,000 at that time. And we raised $7,000.

So it was a huge mess of failure. So crowdfunding for us was just like, ugh. Just the PR if you do. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. So we were very cognizant of that.

Brian Heater (47:43)

Don't hit your goal is bad.

Aadeel Akhtar (47:50)

There are a lot of things that were different when we when we did our start engine campaign five years later, right? One, this was for actual equity, right? In the company. So this was equity crowdfunding as opposed to like ? what we had before was just like, you know, giveaways and things like that for basically like donations. And and the other thing is that we had a huge body of media.

At the time, half of our sales were coming from social media, which for a medical device company is not typical, right? We just released the arm wrestling video a couple of months earlier. We just filmed the flaming board breaking video. And so we were like, okay, we've got these series of videos. We had a Halloween video where we had the hen walking on its own. We just got the robot dog like six months later. And then we filmed videos with the robot dog, like chasing me around the office for Halloween as well too. And so we were like, okay.

If half of our sales are coming from social media, at the very least by putting this campaign out there, it'll double as like more getting more sales as marketing for us in the first place. Right. The other thing is that and this was one of the most beautiful things about it was that we've had our own users invest in the company. And that's something that they never really get a chance to do because investing is typically for the angel investors, the high net worth individuals, not necessarily the public. And for a company that's about accessibility.

Why not make the company itself accessible even to our users? And for them to invest in us to make this for them, that was one of the most beautiful things to me. for all those reasons, we were like, we should do this equity crowdfunding campaign. And there were many events that happened throughout the campaign that just kept it alive and fresh. there was this one week where

There were like three things that happened at the same time. One was that our hand was on a robot arm that was being controlled by brain implants from the University of Chicago that was on 60 minutes. At the same time, we were at South by Southwest and we were doing a TikTok with a company called Free Water where one of our users like grabbed a free bottle of water and then he rotated 360 degrees and that went viral. And then people were like, that's the same company that has this like brain implant controlled by on a can.

And then I went to one of our users' homes and I was just filmed on video of just explaining how the hand works. And that went viral on WhatsApp. And I didn't know you could even go viral on WhatsApp, but it made it to Canada and Pakistan. And it was on the news in Pakistan. And I was like, I don't even know how that happened just from someone who shared it on WhatsApp. And then they were like, this is the same guy that had that TikTok video that also was on.

on the 60 minutes with our their hand was on 60 minutes and all of those things combined, it just kept spiking our our crowdfunding campaign. So I think ? it for us in particular, it worked very, very, very well. ? Whether it's for everyone, that's that's difficult. ? I think it's doable, especially in the robotics space where you have a lot of like, cool visuals that you can rely on. ? But it it does. I mean,

Especially now with like, you know, a new humanoid robot company I feel is being like announced every week.

Brian Heater (51:03)

I got two in my LinkedIn inbox this week.

Aadeel Akhtar (51:07)

Right? And so you're have to do something to stand above the noise, right? And that's where a lot of the creativity comes in by showing a lot of the things that you didn't realize a humanoid robot could do or robot hands could do or robot legs could do that wasn't possible before.

Brian Heater (51:23)

You mentioned the time you were crowdfunding on Indiegogo and you got 7,000 out of a $150,000 goal. ? From the outside, from somebody who's covered Star Wars for a long time, it looks like you've grown quickly. Maybe it doesn't always feel like that on the inside, but were there ever any moments when it just felt like, all right, maybe this isn't going to work out or maybe I'm not the person to do this?

Aadeel Akhtar (51:47)

Yeah, 100%. ? So that summer, right, when we did that Niko over campaign, we were in Shenzhen in China. And so I had my very first employee ever, Jesse Kornman, who's still with us. And he is me. It was my ? wife who was six months pregnant at the time. It was our ? one and a half year old son, ? Jesse.

who had just finished undergrad, me who had just finished my PhD, and then three other students from the University of Illinois, all in a small high-rise in Shenzhen, and only one of us spoke Chinese, and it wasn't me or Jesse or my wife.

Brian Heater (52:27)

And as somebody who's been to Shenzhen a few times, I can tell you, you don't want to visit in the summer.

Aadeel Akhtar (52:32)

Yeah, exactly. Right. And especially, especially with a wife who's six months pregnant. Right. And ? and so we were there for two and half months and we were finding like our gear and our motor manufacturers there. We did this Indigo campaign and that failed miserably. We had won our school's business plan competition in the Illinois Innovation Prize earlier. And so we got like twenty thousand dollars from them. That was basically what was paying for us to be in China that summer. And because that Indigo campaign had failed,

In December of that year, we only had $200 left in our bank account. Jesse was wondering, should he be applying for grad school? And I was like, do I need to continue with medical school and then finish the MD, PhD, go on the academic route instead? But that summer, we had applied for our first Small Business Innovation Research Grant, or SBIR grant, the National Science Foundation.

we found out in the end of December that we would be getting this grant. And it was incredible because we went from $200 in our bank account in the last week of December to $200,200 bank account in the first week of January. And that was more money than we had ever seen. And it's been like this roller coaster ride.

where you have these low lows, but then you have these high highs. But as long as that roller coaster is just continuously is just like increasing, that's like the thing that is really helpful.

Brian Heater (54:06)

Well, Dale, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure and I'll see you in September.

Aadeel Akhtar (54:12)

Yes, I'm looking forward to it. Take care.

Brian Heater (54:18)

Thanks so much to Adil Akhtar for joining us. You can find out more about what he's working on over at psionic.io. And as always for the latest robotics news, features, job listings and more, please subscribe to the automated newsletter that's over at automate.org. Thank you so much for listening. We'll catch you next week.