Theo Health, a smart apparel company, has raised $1.6 million in early funding and added world No. 3-ranked golfer Xander Schauffele as an investor and product tester.
Its first product is sensor-laden compression shorts to track movement through inertial sensors and, in an upcoming update, muscle activity through EMG technology. Theo Health has debuted its alpha product for a select group of individual elite athletes now with plans to expand to a beta group of two pro European soccer clubs and full consumer release by 2027.
Though Theo Health has started with shorts, founder/CEO Jodie Sinclair said her startup already has a proof of concept for a vest to track core and back muscles, with plans to eventually expand to leggings and long sleeves.
The technology seeks to help athletes with performance gains, injury prevention and rehab, and the idea was born from Sinclair’s experience with a debilitating, career-ending knee injury a week before starting college soccer. The Scotland native grew frustrated by the subjective nature of her rehab and began building what became Theo as a university project and has since won seven entrepreneurial awards and grants.
“For the individual who’s going through a recovery, they can see micro-progress that they cannot see or feel yet,” Sinclair said of the wearable data. “You can actually see that it’s going the right way or plateauing or going the wrong way, and it also gives you that psychological encouragement and also accountability.”
A point of emphasis for Sinclair is to ensure that the metrics are digestible by the athletes themselves, as well as coaches. Theo’s user interface in the app is part of its US patent, she said.
“Something that we do above our competitors is that we take the complex data and we do all the smart stuff in the background — all the algorithms, all the changes in the background — and what they see on the front end is intuitive,” Sinclair said.
Given the ACL epidemic among women athletes, Sinclair has prioritized separate product lines for men and women. NYU orthopedic surgeon Dr. Cordelia Carter, who directs the hospital’s women’s and pediatric sports medicine programs, is Theo’s medical advisor.
