Thalmic Labs, a Waterloo Region startup whose $149 gesture-control MYO armband was unveiled Monday, has already secured 10,000 pre-orders for the device, CEO and co-founder Stephen Lake says.
"We're doing very well," Lake said in an interview with UW VeloCity and Communitech, adding that the orders are worth about $1.5 million.
The MYO, its name derived from the Greek myos, for muscle, instantly measures electrical activity in muscles and connects wirelessly to computers, smartphones and other electronics, enabling users to control these devices with a simple wave of the hand.
Lake, along with Matthew Bailey and Aaron Grant, founded Thalmic Labs less than a year ago, in April of 2012. The three University of Waterloo mechatronics engineering grads have been building their technology in the VeloCity Garage at the Communitech Hub in Kitchener, and are progressing through the winter session of Y Combinator's accelerator program in California.
Currently on a brief trip home to Kitchener-Waterloo, Lake sat down in the Garage to talk about the buzz around MYO, whose launch has drawn coverage from TechCrunch, Wired, Engadget and various mainstream media outlets.
He said the company decided to take pre-orders through its getmyo.com site, with a pledge to ship finished devices by the end of 2013, as a way to spark creativity among developers keen on finding uses for the MYO.
"We had, literally, this morning, probably 500 people with different cool and crazy ideas of how they want to use MYO reach out [to us]," Lake said. "So, that’s really going to help us shape the final product that we ship later this year, based on that feedback from developers and what software we build into it, and what they do with it, also."
The MYO is so sensitive that it can read electrical activity in hand, arm and finger muscles before you even begin to move them. It then uses a Bluetooth 4.0 wireless connection to relay your intentions to a linked device.
Video of the MYO in action shows numerous potential uses, from playing music to running presentations to remotely controlling vehicles.
Lake said the idea behind Thalmic was born in a pub near the Communitech Hub, where the co-founders noodled around some of what they had learned at Waterloo.
"We spent some time working in the area of wearable computing in our undergrad," he said, adding that "we kind of realized we could combine a few different things we had worked on."
They developed a crude prototype involving wires, tape and a USB cord linked to an Arduino circuit board. Crude or not, it worked.
"Two months in we were controlling a PowerPoint presentation by doing that, still with all the wires," Lake said. "At that point we were like, ‘Wow, this is pretty cool; it actually works.’"
The founders, who funded their early efforts with credit card debt and loans from family, were happy to win a $25,000 grant from the VeloCity Venture Fund last October. They also received $1.1 million in seed funding from investors they connected with through the Creative Destruction Lab at Toronto's Rotman School of Management.
Thalmic was among the first companies through the Rotman lab, which opened last September. The company raised most of its seed capital from the lab's coaching and investor group, including from Rypple founder Daniel Debow (now a senior VP with Salesforce), Tomi Poutanen (founder of Optimized Search Algorithms), and Lee Lau (co-founder of Alignvest Capital Management and co-founder of ATI Technologies Inc., one of Canada's most successful tech companies, acquired by AMD in 2006).
Thalmic's current stint at Y Combinator "definitely helps put a lot of pressure on us to move quickly, and has given us a network of really experienced people in the Valley who have built massive, massive companies," Lake said.
"That exposure to people have built the Googles and the Apples of the world has been something that’s really shaped our vision as a company, to become something much bigger than our product."
Having said that, Thalmic fully intends to build its business in Waterloo Region, just as VeloCity and Y Combinator alumni companies Vidyard and BufferBox did before them, Lake said.
"We have an offer going in on a new building down the road here from the VeloCity Garage in Kitchener, Ontario," he said, "so we’ll be here."
Lake credited VeloCity and Communitech with helping Thalmic get so much done in so little time.
"We have EIRs [executives in residence] at Communitech who helped us really early on, and kind of shaped the direction we were going and connected us to great resources," he said. "And of course, Communitech has a lot of sway as well in the broader environment of starting a business in Ontario. They can help with lots of issues, whether it’s government issues or connecting with the right people and resources and stuff like that.
"So, between VeloCity and Communitech, it’s been a great help for us."
