May 11, 2020
<aside> 🚀 Selling Design Studio enables us to accelerate our investment in making the tools to build, test, and deploy machine perception applications. **More below.** We’re hiring!
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On Friday, Össur ($OSSR) announced their acquisition of our Prosthetics and Orthotics software, Design Studio. Read their announcement here.
When founders and founding teams start companies, it’s often with the dream and aspiration to make a positive dent in the universe. It's the thing that motivates the long hours and sacrifices of the whole founding team: if we nail this- the future could be better than the past.
In 2015, when Standard Cyborg was born - that glimmer in our eye was to make the process of designing custom Orthotics and Prosthetics (O&P) more accessible. Being a lifelong below-knee amputee, I knew this pain all too well. Garrett joined having seen first hand the quality of prosthetic outcomes achieved in settings with limited resources. We knew there had to be a better way.
We were lucky to be invited to Ycombinator in the spring of 2015, and then to assemble a group of early investors who believed in us and the dream. We were off to the races!
No real story is linear and they all have ups and downs. Ours is no different. We succeeded in much through it all:
We also dealt with almost every classic (and others unforeseen) roadblock along the way! The technology was hard to build, sales and customer support in an industry that prides itself on face-to-face, deep relationships between clinics and their vendors was hard to scale, becoming experts in an industry with so much tribal knowledge and uniqueness is a steep learning curve. In the end, we proudly built an incredible and modern set of tools we call Design Studio.
In 2019, it became clear that Standard Cyborg had the unique combination of skillset, understanding, and momentum to prioritize its efforts on building a broader, more horizontal platform for computer vision based on our learnings and we started the process of finding the right home for Design Studio. We continue to believe in its immense potential to improve the efficiency, experience, and outcomes of patient care in prosthetics and felt a deep tension between the opportunity in the broader computer vision market and our desire to see Design Studio’s potential fulfilled. In 2019, we decided to explore divesting Design Studio if the right partnership could be found.