Backing by Leading Venture Firms Will Accelerate Growth and Bring Assistive Technology into the Digital Age
Cionic Neural Sleeve (Credit: Business Wire)
CIONIC, the innovative bionic clothing company behind the breakthrough Cionic Neural Sleeve, today announced a $12.5M Series A financing. The round was led by BlueRun Ventures, with participation from Caffeinated Capital, EPIC Ventures, JobsOhio Growth Capital Fund, and LDV Capital. This funding follows the Cionic Neural Sleeve’s FDA clearance earlier this year and fuels the manufacturing and delivery of their revolutionary mobility technology to the millions of people living with multiple sclerosis, stroke, cerebral palsy, and other mobility impairments.
To date, the company has raised $23M to build a platform for human augmentation. The Cionic Neural Sleeve is the first product to ship on this platform. The Series A financing will accelerate research trials and commercialization of additional indications, driving a robust product pipeline across the spectrum of human mobility. CIONIC is scaling up its team in key functions such as R&D, engineering, operations, marketing, and customer service to support the next stage of growth. Early investors include technology industry luminaries Max Levchin and Kevin Hartz.
Motivated by his own daughter’s journey with cerebral palsy, long-time technology entrepreneur Jeremiah Robison founded CIONIC in 2018, driven by the conviction that the same advances in sensing and machine learning powering technology like self-driving cars could be used to accelerate assistive technology and enable freer, more independent movement.
The Neural Sleeve is the first product to combine movement analysis and augmentation into a wearable, with a sleek, comfortable design that can be worn anywhere and operated by a smartphone. In multi-site research trials, 94% of participants demonstrated improved mobility when wearing the Neural Sleeve. In a later study to determine the efficacy of the Neural Sleeve over time, the company collected patient-reported outcomes in addition to kinematic data. In addition to improvements in mobility, the number of users experiencing moderate to severe pain was reduced by 60%, and the number of users experiencing moderate to severe anxiety or depression was reduced by 75%. The company launched and sold out of the early adopter Founder’s Program after announcing FDA clearance, and recently opened the Explorer Program, a high-touch early adopter program that will deliver in February of 2023. The program closes at the end of September, and interested parties can visit cionic.com to join.
How It Works
The Cionic Neural Sleeve analyzes, predicts, and augments a person’s movement. It uses a dense array of sensors to measure how the body is positioned and how individual muscles fire during movement, predicts intended movement by measuring the electrical signal from the brain, and then algorithms analyze this data in real time to determine optimal muscle activation patterns. The Neural Sleeve then delivers Functional Electrical Stimulation to sequence proper muscle firing for natural movement. It is an adaptive system that provides real-time augmentation and adjustment of the wearer’s movement, updating each time they take a step.
Source: Company Press Release