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Alphabet X spinoff Skip teams up with Arc'teryx to bring 'everyday' exoskeleton to market

TechBrunchBy TechBrunchJuly 26, 20244 Mins Read
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Skip emerged from stealth this week to announce a partnership with outdoor clothing specialist Arc'teryx. The deal marks the first to market launch of Skip's MO/GO technology, a “powered pant” that utilizes soft exoskeleton technology developed in-house at Alphabet's X Labs moonshot factory.

MO/GO stands for “Mountain Goat” and is a hybrid soft/rigid exoskeleton system designed to increase the wearer's mobility while walking. Rather than actually walking, it provides 40% energy assistance to the quadriceps and hamstrings, reducing strain on the knees.

Pre-orders for the technology will open this week, with shipments expected to begin later this year. MO/GO will have a soft launch as rentals in late summer/early fall near hiking spots like the Grand Canyon. TechCrunch first wrote about the technology in 2021, when it was still a project from the X Labs team.

Alphabet reportedly began reducing X's resources as part of company-wide layoffs in late 2023 or early 2024. Google's parent company includes X Labs in a division called “other businesses,” which lost $1.19 billion in the third quarter of last year.

“Towards the end of 2023, it started to become clear that this wasn't going to make sense as a project within Alphabet,” founder and CEO Katherine Zealand told TechCrunch. “This was a difficult time, as the world was cutting costs. We had to start raising money.”

Alphabet wouldn’t sell Zealand Skip’s foundational IP to her as an individual, so she approached VCs to form a spinout company. To date, the startup has raised $6 million in a combination of capital and grants.

Over the years, Alphabet has adopted different methods for working with its X Labs spinouts: Larger companies like Waymo tend to get more foundational support from the tech giant, while smaller projects are pushed out of the nest and encouraged to strike out on their own.

As Alphabet shrinks its resources, the latter model is likely to become an increasingly popular option: When we spoke to him about his company's generative AI headphones in May, Iyo founder and CEO Jason Rugolo told a similar story, noting that Alphabet participated as an early investor but did not sit on the startup's board.

As Skip began to forge its own path, signing fashion partners became increasingly important in helping it reach its market.

“I have terrible fashion sense,” Zealand says with a laugh. “Even when I was working at X, it was clear to me that this technology had potential. We had people coming in who had bad knees or had trouble climbing stairs, but when they put the prototype on, they could manage.”

Zealand tells the story of a woman who hadn't walked up stairs in 25 years, wearing the technology and climbing two flights of stairs in a row. “But in making the leap from 'this works in the lab' to a practical consumer product that people use every day, a lot of it was about wearability.”

Skip initially explored multiple clothing partnerships before settling on one company: Arc'teryx “checked all the boxes,” Zealand says. The Vancouver, British Columbia-based company makes not only clothing but also “hard goods” like harnesses and ski boots, and combining form and function is Skip's specialty.

While hiking rentals offer anonymous data collection to test MO/GO in harsh real-world scenarios, Skip's ultimate focus is everyday wear; its $4,500 launch cost will almost certainly limit its use to anyone other than those with limited mobility. Zealand says the company is currently conducting clinical trials to test the system's effectiveness in aiding conditions such as Parkinson's disease.

However, it will still be years before the system can be classified as a medical device. In the short term, Skip is aiming to get its system covered by the FSA to bring down the price for users. Scaling up manufacturing will also help bring the price down over time.



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