Skip, a wearable tech startup that began as a secret project within Alphabet, emerged from hiding this week to announce a partnership with outdoor apparel company Arc’teryx. The deal is the first to bring Skip’s technology to market: “powered pants” that use a soft exoskeleton.
The technology, called MO/GO, short for “mountain goat,” is a hybrid soft/rigid system designed to aid the wearer’s mobility and support them while walking. Rather than actually walking for a person, it provides 40 percent energy assistance to the quadriceps and hamstrings, while taking the work off the knees.
Reservations for the technology open this week, with deliveries expected to begin later this year. MO/GO will soft-launch in late summer or early fall as a rental near hiking destinations like the Grand Canyon.
TechCrunch first wrote about the technology in 2021, when it was still a project under development internally at Alphabet’s X Labs moon factory.
But between late 2023 and early 2024, Alphabet reportedly will begin reducing X’s resources as part of company-wide layoffs. Google’s parent company includes X Labs in a unit called “Other Bets,” which lost $1.19 billion in the third quarter of last year.
“Towards the end of 2023, it became clear that this project didn’t really make sense within Alphabet,” founder and CEO Kathryn Zealand tells TechCrunch. “It was also a time when there were a lot of cost cuts and things were going to be tricky. We had to start raising money.”
Alphabet didn’t want to sell Skip’s intellectual property to Zealand as an individual, so it reached out to venture capitalists to try to spin off the company. To date, the startup has raised $6 million through a combination of funding and grants.
As the company began to stand on its own two feet, signing a fashion partner became an increasing priority for the company’s marketing.
“I have terrible fashion sense,” Zealand says with a laugh. “It was clear, even when we were working at X, that the technology had potential. People would come in and they had bad knees or they had trouble getting up stairs. They’d put on a prototype and they could do it.”
Zealand tells the story of a woman who hadn’t climbed a flight of stairs in 25 years, and who did it twice in a row wearing the technology. “But the transition from ‘it works in a lab’ to people using this consumer product in their daily lives was a real challenge for consumers,” she says.
Skip initially considered several apparel partnerships before settling on just one. Arc’teryx “checked all the boxes,” Zealand says. The Vancouver, B.C.-based company produces not only apparel but also “hard goods” like harnesses and ski boots—a perfect blend of form and function that fit Skip’s needs.
The ride rentals will collect anonymous data to test MO/GO in challenging, real-world scenarios, but Skip’s ultimate goal is to wear it in everyday life. The $4,500 launch cost will almost certainly limit its use to people with limited mobility. Zealand says the company is currently conducting clinical trials to test the system’s effectiveness in treating conditions like Parkinson’s.
However, it will be years before the system is classified as a medical device. In the short term, Skip is considering getting its system covered by the FSA to help lower the price for users. Increasing production will also help lower the price over time.
Over the years, Alphabet has used different methods to work with X Labs spinoffs. Larger projects like Waymo tend to receive more fundamental support from the tech giant, while smaller projects are nudged out of the nest and encouraged to fly on their own.
The latter model seems to be becoming a more common option as Alphabet has scaled back its resources. Iyo founder and CEO Jason Rugolo told us a similar story when we talked about his company’s AI-powered generative headphones back in May, noting that Alphabet had been an early investor but had chosen not to sit on the startup’s board.
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