Building Bionics That People Can Feel featuring Aadeel Akhtar

How can a 7-year-old's encounter transform hardware into healthcare? Listen now. Welcome to The Connect Current, the flow of innovation in San Diego. We bring you the founders, investors, and leaders building the future across life science, tech, climate, defense, AI, and more. This is where San Diego's next chapter takes shape. Welcome to The Connect Current, the flow of innovation in San Diego. I'm your host, James Zanewicz, and this episode is being recorded at Kiln in Rancho Bernardo. We want to thank them for that support and remind you that when you're looking for coworking space, look no further than Kiln. Today, I'm joined by Adil Akhtar, founder and CEO of Psionic, and one of Connect's 2026 Cool Companies. Psionic is building advanced bionic limbs designed to be more accessible, more durable, and more human-centered. The company's first product, the Ability Hand, is a bionic hand that moves all 5 fingers, provides users with a sense of touch, and is designed to withstand real-world impact. And if you're not certain if you know Adeel yet or not, if you've ever been at an event and seen someone shaking hands with a bionic hand, that was him. You saw him across the room. He leaves an impression, and I've remembered him since the first moment I met him. And you always need your stick and a reason for people to remember you, which is great. But your path into this work started early. As a child visiting Pakistan, you met a girl with a limb difference who did not have access to the same healthcare resources that you did. That experience helped shape a mission that has stayed with you, building advanced prosthetics that are accessible to the people who need them. This is exactly the kind of conversation we like to have on the Connect Current because it brings together robotics, health innovation, human-centered design, manufacturing, access, and the founder journey. It's also a great example of why we're excited to recognize Psionic as part of our 2026 Connect cool companies. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.

I am so excited to have you here and dig in because we've gotten to chat at events and I've gotten to, you know, obviously see the prosthetic limb, see the full robot. We've never gotten to dive into your story. So for those who are meeting you and Psionic for the first time, what are you building? What problem are you solving? And why has this mission been so personal?

Yeah. And so we're specifically solving dexterity for humans and robots, and we do that through bionic hardware and AI software. And so our first product, which you mentioned, the AbilityHand, is a bionic hand that's like IP64 waterproof. All 5 fingers flex and extend. The thumb rotates as well. It's got touch sensing on it, so it's the first bionic hand to provide users with a sense of touch. Our first patient in the US is an Army sergeant who lost his hand in Iraq in 2005 due to a roadside bomb. He told us he could actually feel his daughter's hand with the hand. He couldn't do that with any other prosthetic.

Incredible.

That's why we do what we do, right? And so we've got over 300 human users of the AbilityHand already. It's covered by Medicare. It's FDA approved in the US, and over 90 robotics companies are using it worldwide, from NASA, Meta, Google, Amazon. Mercedes is building cars with them through Aptronics humanoid robots. So top automotive companies, top industrial warehouse companies, and top brain-computer interface companies are using our hands for both human and robots all over the world.

When did you realize this was not a research project but was a company?

Yeah, so while I was doing my PhD, my original plan was to actually do an MD-PhD program. I was a masochist.

That's right. Because you were punishing yourself for something. Coming out of academic medicine, I know this well.

Starting a company, although, was a similar set of masochism on that, right? But so while I was doing my PhD, we got the chance to go down to Quito, Ecuador. We were working with a nonprofit organization there called the Range of Motion Project. And their mission is to provide prosthetics to those who can't afford them, primarily in Guatemala and Ecuador. And this is part of a much longer story of 2 weeks of all-nighters and trying to get a very early prototype of the AbilityHand working, but the hand at the time. It was fully 3D-printed, 3 times the size of an average human hand, wires going everywhere, plugging into breadboards, power supplies, the wall. But our very first patient ever, his name is Juan Zúquillo. He lost his left hand 35 years prior due to a landmine explosion. He was in the Ecuadorian Army, and there was a border war between Ecuador and Peru. And in front of international news stations, he said he felt as though a part of him had come back. And that was because he made a pinch with his left hand for the first time in 35 And when he said that, that's when I realized if I finish medical school, stay in academia, and work at an academic hospital, this just ends up as a journal paper. If we wanted everyone to feel the same way as Juan, we had to commercialize this technology. And that's when Psionic was born.

Well, it goes back way before that, apparently, because you shared before the journey began when you were very young and met someone who didn't have access to the same kind of prosthetic care as many people in America, and that she desperately needed. How did that moment turn into the decision to do this research and build the company?

Yeah, I mean, ever since I was 7, right? That's how long I've been wanting to develop bionic limbs. When I visited Pakistan, because that's where my parents are from— I'm from Chicago originally— that was my first time really seeing that kind of poverty before. And, you know, it was this young woman who was, like, outside of a bazaar that was just missing a leg, using a tree branch as a crutch, missing her right leg. And hobbling towards us and asking for money. And, you know, at the time I wondered, you know, we have the same ethnic heritage, but we have such vastly different qualities of life.

Mm-hmm.

And as I grew older, I began to realize that this was due to a lack of resources, right? So financial resources, healthcare resources, security, et cetera. And that's kind of what inspired me, right? That's what set that initial, like, spark that this is an inequity that, that should be solved. And, you know, you couple that with just cool technology and sci-fi and all of that that's happening, like Fullmetal Alchemist, Star Wars. Like, you see cool bionic limbs in all of those things, and you couple that with seeing this girl who was missing a leg, that had an impression on me at a young age. And I was like, this is a really cool field to go into.

Mm-hmm.

And the original plan was to become a clinician, a medical doctor that worked with patients with limb differences, and then provide care for them. But then it was really that Ecuador trip where We saw the impact that the technology could have on a global scale that really solidified that I was always gonna do research in this field, but to have the impact that we wanted to, commercialization was the best way to do it.

And so you mentioned Chicago. So before we bounce to the next question and kind of transition from that, I have to ask, Cubs or Sox?

I was a Cubs fan growing up, so.

So you were a Cubs fan before it was cool? Yeah, yeah.

When they were losing all the time up until they won the World Series. There you go.

Excellent, excellent. It's just the important things people need to know when they're approaching you.

That's right.

This technology is different because the AbilityHand sits at the intersection of robotics, touch feedback, durability, AI, affordability, all these things. But in your view, what makes it so different from traditional prosthetics? And what did you have to get right technically for it to work in the real world?

Yeah, I mean, there were a lot of things that we had considered from the beginning in terms of designing the hand. When we, we did a lot of customer discovery, talking to as many clinicians as possible, as many people living differences as possible. And several things just kept coming up. One of them was just making the hand super robust to impact. And we were 3D printing these hands at the time, right, with, like, low-cost, like, hobbyist 3D printers with just cheap plastic. And they were saying that their $50,000 bionic hand was breaking, right? And that was injection-molded, custom-machined steel.

Yeah.

And we were like, well, if that's breaking, if we give them a 3D-printed hand, this thing's gonna break within, like, a minute of using it. And We were like, how could we leverage the low cost of 3D printing but still make this hand more affordable than anything else?

Right.

And we came across this field called soft robotics. And in soft robotics, instead of making your materials out of rigid components like injection-molded plastics or custom machined steel, you make them out of materials that are more like your own biology, so silicone and rubber. So I can squeeze the fingers together, and they're flexible. They'll bend in. And so I've taken those fingers, and I can slam the hand on the table, and it's totally fine. For the viewers out there, I just slammed the hand. Yeah.

Well, and having shaken the hand, I can tell you it actually feels remarkably close to a real human hand, which is amazing.

Yeah, except I can actually drop this 30 feet in the air and it survives the impact. I put it in a dryer for 10 minutes and it survived.

So it's more durable than people.

It's more durable than people. I mean, humans have the advantage that they can heal, whereas we haven't gotten to the point with self-healing materials yet where they're actually—

But we damage way quicker as well.

Yeah, we do damage way quicker than that. And we even did flaming board breaking with the hand where we had 3 wooden boards, set them on fire, and had our users like punch through it, right? And you're not going to be doing that on a daily basis, right? But if it can survive that, then it should be able to survive you accidentally slamming your hand against like a table or jamming it in a door or a robot falling or a robot jamming its hand into a wall.

Or touching a hot pot.

Or touching a hot pot. Exactly. Exactly. Um, so durability is one thing. Touch feedback was another thing, being able to feel from it and then getting it covered under Medicare. That was huge for us, right? For it to make this, we expanded access from 10% of patients who could afford it to Oh, incredible.

Well, that leads to the next question, because a lot of breakthrough health technologies struggle because the innovation is impressive, but access is limited, and you're breaking through that. So how do you think about building something advanced enough to change lives, but accessible enough to actually reach the people that— that's your mission?

Yeah. And so this is where things get really interesting, because when we first designed this hand, right, it was primarily a prosthetic device. But I did my PhD in a robotics lab, and so we had a programming interface for it that was open source, so you could control each one of the fingers and all the motors and stream all the touch sensors or Bluetooth or a USB connection. And from the get-go, when we released this nationwide in 2022, Meta was an early purchaser of our hand to put on a robot arm. And they were doing reinforcement learning and early AI on it. And we were like, oh, okay, that's cool. I mean, we did make it for those purposes as well. And if you're building a robot to do human tasks, we've optimized our hands for humans to do human tasks. So it makes sense that the robots use the same thing.

And so.

Since the beginning, we're making this hand for both humans and robots. It's just that over the last couple years, the robotics market has just exploded, right? With all the humanoid software. Crazy.

Yeah.

Exactly. AI and humanoid robots and physical AI in particular, right? And we're seeing this almost, like, renaissance of physical AI being applied to robots that now have a brain to do all sorts of different tasks from, like, pick-and-place to stocking shelves to folding laundry to washing dishes. And the interesting thing there is that our human users were already doing all that stuff, right? And the biggest issue in robotics right now is dexterity. You can get your robot from point A to point B, but it can't do anything.

Can it be nimble while it does it?

Exactly, right? And that's where we come in, where we've solved that because our human users have figured out how to do these tasks. So we can take data from our human users to train AI models on the robotics side, and then the volume on the robot side can subsidize the cost for the humans, so more patients can actually get access to the most advanced bionic hand on the market. And so it's this incredible flywheel that the robotics side is allowing for more humans to get access to this, and the more humans that get access to it improves the robotics side. So what we build for humans benefits robots, what we build for robots benefits humans. On top of that, we also have a program that we started with the Range of Motion Project, that initial group that I went down to Ecuador with.

Right.

And we started a program called the Ability Fund, where every $25K that's donated will completely cover the costs of a bionic hand and all of the medical services, and we'll donate a leg to someone in Guatemala or Ecuador. So it's an arm and a leg for $25K, which is typically $100,000 to $150,000 worth of services and devices.

Yeah.

So we've been excited to run that initiative. We've funded 2 patients already. The first one was a high school student from South San Diego, was bullied as a kid for— he was born without his hand, Ivan Krastev. And he got our hand last year. He graduated high school. He was holding his cap with it.

He's got the coolest hand on the market.

Exactly. And it was just this incredible experience. We fit our second patient just towards the end of last year and just in time for Christmas. And it was a woman out of North Carolina, Randy Gleason, who was also born without her hand. And she's an occupational therapist. Insurance told her that she was only allowed one hand for her entire life. And the thing is, the improvements that are being made on this, like every— it's almost like a cell phone.

Yeah, exactly.

2 years, like you want to upgrade, you want to upgrade, right? And so through the Ability Fund, she was able to upgrade her hand to ours. And she just had a baby, and she's doing all sorts of, like, things with the baby, with the hand. And I mean, this is why we do what we do.

Well, and because you are more than just software, obviously, because you have the device, you're building hard tech in health and physical technology that has to work for real people in the real world with real clinical and reimbursement considerations, as we just talked about, one hand for your life. What has been the hardest about turning it from an invention to a scalable company, given those realities?

Yeah, I mean, there's always regulatory hurdles that you're going to face, especially on the clinical side of things. But I would say that that may have limited the market size, for example. But the thing is, is that there's 10 million people worldwide who are missing hands. So it's a fairly large market. It's just that 80% of them are in developing nations, right? And so to have that beachhead, of the robotics side to just kind of like anchor and then just take care of all the humans. I think to me, in my head, that's like a no-brainer, right? It's just this beautiful way that we can use technology to really benefit humanity, not just as a prosthetic hand, but then as a robotic arm that's doing all these tasks to help the humans as well.

Well, and the thing that I love is that you were selected as one of our cool companies for this year. And it's a judge of VCs. Like, I got to sit there and watch, but I don't— I'm not the smartest guy in the room, and I always admit that. But we had the smartest people in the room investing in real things decide that you're one of the most investable Series A companies. But as you build your next chapter, what does being connected through the cool companies into San Diego's innovation ecosystem mean for the company? And what kind of partners, investors, or collaborators would be most helpful for you right now?

Yeah, so we moved to San Diego about 3 and a half years ago, and there were very specific reasons why we moved to San Diego.

Because the weather's better than Chicago?

Of course. I mean, so it's a— Absolutely. Especially outside of the 3 months of summer.

Yeah.

But there's only 3 military hospitals in the US. And we've got Walter Reed in DC, we've got Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, and then we've got Balboa here in San Diego. And we're working very closely with the Navy Hospital here on the next generation of these bionic limbs that can be directly attached to your muscles, your bones, and your nerves. We're working with Dr. James Flint, an orthopedic surgeon at the Navy here, as well as a hand surgeon at UCSD where I'm also affiliate faculty now, Dr. Kate Hinchcliffe, on developing these microwire electrodes that we can implant directly in your nerves to really enable individual finger control, unlock dexterity for the humans. And then when you touch an object, you can stimulate your nerves and make it feel like it's actually coming from your missing hand, as opposed to just like a random vibration or just random sensations that you feel. And there's a huge medtech community here to kind of support all of that development. So there's a large talent pool here. There's a large patient population with the military. Out here, there's all the incredible engineering schools like UCSD, SDSU, and then LA not too far from here with UCLA, Caltech, USC up there. The Olympic Training Center is— the Paralympic Training Center is 40 minutes away in Chula. We've got the Challenged Athletes Foundation as well here, the largest nonprofit in the world for getting people access to sports and parasports. And no one was really building the prosthetics here. So we were like, we can come here, bring all of those resources together, and turn San Diego into the bionics capital of the world. And that is exactly what we're doing now.

100%. And, you know, when we're looking at things like, you know, the Olympics in 2 years, Invictus potentially, like, you guys are so well positioned to capitalize on those moments. So for investment right now, what are you looking for?

Yeah. And so we've got strong corporate interest from like NVIDIA, LG, Amazon, Analog Devices, Murata, Kyocera. And we're looking for like lead investors to kind of anchor that. One of the things that's great about San Diego, again, is that because there's both the tech and the medtech focus, our ideal investor understands both sides, right? So robotics and healthcare, and that's where we live. And for us, it's a symbiotic relationship between the two. So we're really excited to work within the ecosystem, again, to turn San Diego into the bionics capital of the world.

And if somebody is really moved by this, say an investor who wants to give you money or open their network or all these things, What's the best way to get in touch with you?

Best way to get in touch with me would be to send me an email. So it's aaktar, so A-A-K-H-T-A-R, @psionic.io. Or you can find me on LinkedIn or just go to our website and send us a message through there.

Fantastic. Well, we always like to end with our standard, very Connect Current question. San Diego is a city of creativity, you know, innovation, everything else What drives your innovative flow? Where do you get your spark?

Yeah, we get our spark from our incredible user base of— yeah, I mean, so I'll give you an example. We just had an open house last weekend. We were screening a film that we had just made that depicted one of our users hitting the world's first bionic home run. So Jamie Groshong, when he was 17, he lost his hand due to a fireworks accident. He was going to play D1 baseball. And so that kind of changed his trajectory. And then last year, he got our hand. And we wanted to see, like, can we play baseball with it? And we got him to throw out the first pitch at the San Francisco Giants game.

Wow!

And then I went to his childhood baseball diamond back in Sacramento, and I threw out a bunch of pitches to him, and then he was able to hit the world's first bionic home run. And now he's a student at SDSU, and we— we want to see if we can get him out on, like, the SDSU field and, like, have—

SDSU field? Let's get him in Petco!

Come on!

Yeah, let's—

that's even better!

I'm down!

The screen's big!

Yeah, let's do it. I mean, I won't take nothing away from SDSU. I love SDSU, but, you know, downtown.

If we can get him to, like, hit a home run from, like, a Padres pitcher, I'm down. James, if you can make that happen, let's, let's do it.

Trey's got some connections with the Padres. He might be able to do a little hookup for us.

All right. All right.

Well, I want to thank you so much. This was not just an insightful, but a powerful conversation. And I think it's a great reminder that the most meaningful innovation often starts with the most human of context. And your work shows what Psionic's doing, what can happen when robotics, health tech design, and access come together with that really mission-driven mentality. We're excited to have Psionic again as one of our 2026 Cool Companies, and I really appreciate you joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks for listening to the Connect Current. If you want to learn more about Connect and explore resources across San Diego's innovation ecosystem, ecosystem, follow us on LinkedIn or visit connect.org. We'll see you next time on The Connect Current, where San Diego's innovation story keeps moving forward.

This podcast was edited and produced by Resonate Recordings.