skipThe wearable tech startup, which began as a secret project within Alphabet, emerged from stealth this week to announce a partnership with outdoor clothing specialist Arc’teryx, marking the first deal to bring Skip’s technology, known as “powered pants,” to market using soft exoskeletons.
Called “MO/GO,” short for “Mountain Goat,” the technology is a soft/rigid hybrid system designed to aid the wearer’s mobility and increase power while walking. Instead of actually walking, it provides 40% more energy support to the quads and hamstrings, reducing strain on the knees.
Pre-orders for the technology will begin this week, with shipments expected to start later this year. MO/GO will have a soft launch as a rental in late summer/early fall near hiking spots like the Grand Canyon.
Originally published by TechCrunch Technology in 2021At the time, it was still a project being developed in-house at Alphabet’s X Labs moonshot factory.
However, in late 2023 or early 2024, Alphabet Reportedly The company has begun reducing resources at X as part of company-wide layoffs. Google’s parent company includes X Labs in a division called “Other Bets,” 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 would not sell Skip’s foundational IP to Zealand as an individual, so she approached venture capitalists to form a spin-out company. To date, the startup has raised $6 million in a combination of capital and grants.
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 climbed 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 wearability challenges,” she says.
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.
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 a more frequent 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 while Alphabet participated as an early investor, it chose not to sit on the startup’s board.
