We understand
the pain as fellow athletes

Kylin picked up a basketball at 8 years old.

Growing up in Asia, life was pressure — family expectations, a hyper-competitive world, the weight of thinking differently in a place that rarely rewarded it. Basketball became the one constant.

Basketball was the only friend I had that was always there. You bounce it, it answers you. It always comes back.

It wasn't just a sport. It was the only place he ever felt free.

At 17, one knee injury ended it.

Not just the dream of playing college basketball — but the thing that had carried him through everything. He feared more than losing a pathway to his American dream. He feared having his life forever changed.

But the pain turned into a question. Why did his body fail him without warning, without data, without any pattern? And then a bigger one: why do 1.7 billion people experience the same thing every year?

Our biology is still running on an instinct system that was last updated 200,000 years ago — built for the savanna, not the stadium. Natural selection designed us to react after danger strikes. Never before. And yet we keep pushing further: athletes, soldiers, workers demanding things from their bodies that evolution never anticipated.

That's why injuries don't feel like mistakes. They feel random.

This isn't failure. It's the next step in evolution.

Kylin decided to close that gap.

He met Bhavy in an electronics engineering class at University College London — an engineer who had spent years building intelligent systems for NATO defense programs and rehabilitative devices. Machines that could sense danger, adapt in real time, and respond before failure.

Bhavy had been building things since he was 6 years old, growing up in the rougher parts of London — tinkering, fixing, accidentally making chlorine gas in primary school. The kind of kid who couldn't stop taking things apart to understand how they worked, and putting them back together to make them better.

I've always been obsessed with stopping people from getting hurt. Then I realized things are much bigger than that.

Kylin saw exactly what Hippos needed. He asked Bhavy to build it with him. Bhavy said yes.