You’ve heard of car airbags that deploy in milliseconds to protect passengers. How about a knee airbag?

That’s what former basketball prospect Kylin Shaw is working on with his startup. Hippo exoskeleton — a “knee sleeve” that measures the stress on the knee joint and inflates around the knee to protect it from major injuries such as ACL and MCL tears. The sleeve inflates in 30 milliseconds, which the company says is faster than the 60 milliseconds it takes for ACL tears to occur.

“I myself have loved basketball since I was six years old, and for the next decade it became my whole life,” Shaw told TechCrunch.

“I dedicated myself to intense training… But at 17, just as I was preparing for a professional basketball career and the NCAA tryouts, I heard a nasty pop from my knee as I was landing a dunk” , he said.

The injury ended Shaw’s sporting career prospects, but gave him the idea to combine artificial intelligence-based sensors and a “kneepad”. He dropped out of the London School of Economics to develop it.

Hippos said the brace uses predictive AI to detect risky movements in real time and deploy airbags around the knee, potentially saving athletes thousands in medical expenses.

Shaw and his co-founder Bhavy Metakar (CTO) initially launched Hippos, investing $1,000 of their savings to develop a prototype and generate initial pre-orders from clinics and athletes. The startup has now raised a pre-seed round of $642,000 from investors Possible Ventures and Silicon Roundabout Ventures.

Shaw told Techcrunch that the company has already achieved “over six figures in pre-orders” and will use the new funding to further develop the product and reach a full launch in about three months.

He said the eventual unit would cost around $129 and come with a $29/month to $99/month subscription plan that covers AI insights, small air canisters and workout tracking.

The startup has held trials with UK soccer clubs as well as star athletes such as world ski champion Alex Schlopy of the US Ski Team. In a statement, Schlopy said: “I am impressed with the preventive function and it feels so light and comfortable! This brace gives me a sense of psychological security.”

Beyond elite athletes, Shaw said the product could be used to prevent injuries for anyone else, such as construction workers or the elderly.

Hippos could push a door open. While approximately 150,000 ACL injuries are reported in the United States each year and 8.6 million globally among adults, those statistics do not include injuries among children. Also, most health solutions focus on rehabilitation rather than prevention.

Moreover, existing companies addressing joint protection in sports and rehabilitation focus on traditional support devices or post-injury support.

Brands in this space include Enovis DonJoy (braces and orthopedic supports), ExoKinetics’ Zeen (devices primarily for rehabilitation) and Doctor Soc (sports braces and protective gear for injury management). None of these solutions offer predictive or reactive technology like the Hippos airbag does.

Also participating in the round were Huggingface co-founder and CSO Thomas Wolf; Wayve co-founder Amar Shah and Dr James Brown, UK Athletics’ senior sports medicine doctor.