Startup says Denver is perfect place to make its high-tech, mesh “skin”
On the heels of a round of successful fundraising, the founders and employees of Cipher Skin were displaying their products and talking to crowds in downtown Denver about the company’s technology, which transmits real-time data about the human body and physical objects.
It’s Denver Startup Week and the gathering, which runs through Friday and draws thousands of people, is a great opportunity to mingle with other entrepreneurs, CEOs and prospective investors, Cipher Skin co-founder and CEO Phillip Bogdanovich, said Tuesday.
“It’s the tech version of speed dating,” Bogdanovich said at an outdoor showcase of startups in Lower Downtown.
But Bogdanovich and his team said their enterprise is no oneoff. Two of their patents have been approved and six more are pending. And the company sees Denver as fertile ground for its growth.
“Denver is definitely on an upswing. The engineering talent here for us is fantastic,” Bogdanovich said.
In April, Cipher Skin, which Bogdanovich started with Craig Weller, the chief information officer, raised about $1.25 million in seed funding from South Oak Capital Partners, LSVBR partners and other investors. The eight-member staff is moving to a larger office in downtown Denver. Bogdanovich said he expects to add another dozen people soon.
And the company is talking to a couple of sports teams, a large water company in Europe, oil and gas companies and the military about trying their products, including helmets, arm and knee sleeves and wraps for pipelines.
A mesh is embedded with sensors that simultaneously registers several data points. In the case of a person, those can be body motions, heart and respiratory rates, and oxygen levels. The device, connected to the cloud, models movements in three dimensions, creating what the company calls the “Digital Mirror.”
“We want to build the biggest database in the world on human biomechanics,” said Guido Gioberto, the company’s head engineer.
The company is talking to the military about its helmets, which can be used to monitor the body heat of a soldier or construction worker and immediately signal the person and a supervisor when the temperature rises past a safe range.
In the case of pipelines, the sensors detect and immediately convey data that signal a leak, a rupture, vibrations or dislocations.
The company grew from a relationship between Weller and Bogdanovich, both in special operations with the military in Baghdad. Weller was training soldiers and worked with Bog
danovich, who was dealing with injuries and pain.
“I learned to train people by paying really close attention to their movements under stress and immediately corrected somebody’s movement when they deviated from a safe pattern,” Weller said.
The approach worked well for Bogdanovich, who started sleeping better, had less pain and could run “a sub-five minute mile,” Weller said. Then Bogdanovich moved to a different location and began having problems again. He and Weller discussed how to replicate the immediate feedback that had helped him before.
“They thought, ‘How can we put a Craig in the pocket of every person? How can we personalize training at scale,’ ” said Shaka Bahadu, a co-founder and chief operating officer of Cipher Skin.
Bogdanovich, whom Bahadu described as “a math nerd,” designed a mesh in a geometric pattern that has censors and circuits that carry power and data.
After being told it would cost $3 million to produce an arm sleeve incorporating the technology, Bahadu said Bogdanovich took a couple of weeks in his garage to build a model for $3,400.
The co-founders spent time in California trying to raise money to get things rolling. They had better luck with investors in Texas and Louisiana.
There’s a lot of money in Silicon Valley, Weller said, but getting investors there intrigued can be difficult.
“Unless you made a new dating app for hamsters or some weird thing, some software that can be built in two weeks, no one is really that interested,” Weller said. “Denver and places like it are breaking away from that trend and building things that are actually real and really matter.”
Bogdanovich and his wife were visiting Weller in Denver when he decided to move from Austin, Texas, to the Mile High City. He rattled off some of the area’s selling points: several professional sports teams, a lot of engineers, the U.S. Olympic Training Center, robust oil, gas and mining industries, the Colorado School of Mines and the “exponentially” lower cost of living compared with the West Coast.
He also noted that Denver recently notched its first “unicorn,” a privately held startup valued at more than $1 billion. Mobile shopping app Ibotta announced in August that it had reached that milestone.
The Downtown Denver Partnership said it is tracking 875 startups operating just in the downtown area, employing more than 5,400 workers. The Partnership defines a startup as a company in the tech sector that was founded in the past decade and has fewer than 100 employees.