Phillip Bogdanovich and Craig Weller don’t have a traditional startup founding story.
They didn’t come from another company, branching off to pursue a new idea. Nor did they meet at a conference and hit it off over a beer.
Their unorthodox founding story starts in the Middle East, where the duo met while serving in the military.
During his career, Bogdanovich was a U.S. Marine Corp recon corpsman medic and tactical medical chief for the Department of State. Weller was in U.S. Navy Special Operations, as well as a former Department of State security specialist.
“I was sitting at home on a Friday on the couch drinking a beer and reading a study from the 1980’s from Oxford on the conductive mucosal tissues of earth worms in motion.”
The two crossed paths in Baghdad as Weller was training special operations soldiers. He would pay attention to movement quality under stress, correcting it when it deviated.
The training worked wonders for Bogdanovich, who now jokes about the frequency of which he was shot while deployed. For those counting, Bogdanovich was shot on each of his three deployments.
After working with Weller for six months, Bogdanovich was in top physical condition.
“Then, Phil moved to another part of Baghdad and we could no longer train together,” Weller said. “As soon as that happened, he started to have pain again and he started to get injured because we lost that feedback loop.”
The duo began discussing how they could take this in-person feedback and move it to a digital solution. They had a rough idea, to add sensors to a piece of clothing to allow for digital feedback on body mechanics and motion.
After an initial proof of concept and a couple of patent applications, Bogdanovich and Weller let the idea drift. When the patents were surprisingly approved, they both wondered how they could take this idea and build it into a business.
That’s when a chance encounter spawned the company.
“I was sitting at home on a Friday on the couch drinking a beer and reading a study from the 1980’s from Oxford on the conductive mucosal tissues of earth worms in motion,” Bogdanovich said casually. “My wife walked in and she set the groceries on the counter and she took out this wine bottle and it had the protective thing around it and I was like ‘OHHH.’”
That was the birth of Cipher Skin.
The Denver-based startup has taken the science behind the worms and the sleeve around the wine bottle to build a cloud-connected sensor mesh, embedded in garments, that measures key metrics and tracks movement in three-dimensions.
To help grow and further develop this idea, Cipher Skin added Shaka Bahadu to the founding team. Bahadu has experience in the digital health world, working at two Y Combinator startups prior to joining Cipher Skin.
After prototyping and testing the technology, the company’s first product, the BioSleeve, launched in December. The BioSleeve is a smart compression sleeve that enables users to visualize, via an app, real-time complex motions of their arms or knees in three dimensions, providing key measurements such as range of motion and joint angular velocity.
In addition to capturing motion, the sleeve collects heart rate and oxygen saturation data. All that data is automatically stored and managed in the Digital Mirror software application, for monitoring progress over time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=H6D2LRpM7Qg&feature=emb_title
Cipher Skin’s original goal was to take training, similar to what Weller provided, and make that available to the masses through a tech-enabled shirt. They’ve started small, first focusing on an individual sleeve that can monitor one leg or one arm in space.
“We’re a really useful tool in training and physical therapy, and that was something I hadn’t seen eight months ago,” Bogdanovich said.
The sleeve and connected application collect range of motion and joint velocity data that is often time-consuming for physical therapists. From there, patients are able to see progress appointment-over-appointment.
Cipher Skin’s second product is not in the athletic space, instead using this innovative sleeve technology to monitor a different type of cylinder – pipes.
The Pipe Sleeve can remotely measure continuously, and in real-time, all kinds of forces that act on a pipeline, including stress, strain, distortion, flow and leaks.
The company recently announced a $1 million investment in the technology from Boyett Petroleum, an independent fuel supplier and retailer.
From its founding, to its offices, Cipher Skin isn’t your typical tech startup. The company operates out of a third-floor office in a Victorian home a block away from Denver’s infamous East Colfax Avenue. What was once a floor full of bedrooms and closets, now serves as a hub for the company’s innovative technology.
Cipher Skin, which was founded in August 2017, has seven employees and is looking to triple that number by the end of the first quarter of this year as its products gain traction. The founders have set a goal of deploying 1,000 sleeves by the second quarter of this year.
The company raised $1.35 million in seed funding in April 2019 and is currently in the middle of a $5 million Series A that it expects to complete in the near future.
Looking forward, the founders stressed that the company is a data company first and foremost, and that the physical products are stepping stones to collect that data.
“I want to be in a place where I can look at a bridge where I know there is Cipher technology embedded in the concrete,” Bogdanovich said. “I want to look at roadways and t-shirts and knowing that we have been part of ushering in this tech-centric acquisition of info that can be used to help people live longer, healthier lives and sustain infrastructure in a way that’s really meaningful.”
