Insoles Are the Wedge.
DME Is the Bridge.
Bionics Is the Destination.

My grandfather made orthotics by hand in India. My father built one of the ten largest O&P clinic chains in the world. His clinics dispense advanced prosthetics to real patients every day.

Three generations of my family have worked at the intersection of the human body and the devices that support it. I have spent my entire life inside this industry. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that we are standing at the beginning of a transformation that will be studied for the next hundred years.

Within our lifetimes, custom devices that augment, heal, and enhance human capability will become as routine as prescription eyeglasses. A warehouse worker will put on a powered exoskeleton the way she puts on steel-toed boots. A diabetic patient will receive a custom device manufactured to her exact geometry and delivered within days. A child born without a hand will be fitted with a prosthetic designed by AI and printed overnight. The human body will become a platform, and the devices that interface with it will be manufactured, personalized, and delivered through a single integrated system.

The company that builds that system will be one of the most important companies of the next century.

We are building that company.

There are 300 million durable medical equipment transactions per year in the United States. Wheelchairs. Hospital beds. CPAP machines. Prosthetic limbs. Custom orthotics. Spinal braces. Wound care supplies. Infusion pumps. Respiratory devices. Every single one runs on the same broken infrastructure of fax machines, manual intake, and paper-based compliance. The total market is $200 billion. Roughly $50 billion of that is pure administrative waste.

Today we own the workflow for custom insoles. Tomorrow we will own it for all of DME. And the day after that, we will use the infrastructure we've built to become the default delivery engine for bionics and human augmentation.

The path has three phases. Each one builds on the last. Each one is an order of magnitude larger than the last. And the first two are already underway.

This is a $100 billion company. Let me show you why.

Before I walk through the phases, I need you to understand what we're fighting against. Because this is personal.

That is a fact. And it should make you angry.

In the 1980s and 90s, DME fraud was rampant. The regulatory response was to bury the industry in compliance requirements so severe that legitimate providers have been crushed under the weight of them for decades. The system designed to prevent fraud is now preventing care. The bureaucracy has won, and patients are paying with their bodies.

Here is what that looks like. Joe has diabetes. His physician notices neuropathy and refers him to a podiatrist. The podiatrist does a foot exam and says Joe needs diabetic shoes and custom insoles. Simple enough.

Except Joe now enters a labyrinth. Referral processing. Insurance verification. Document procurement from half a dozen teams. Compliance reviews. Fax communication that takes weeks. His provider spends $46 in direct labor just processing paperwork before Joe walks in the door. The clinician spends nearly 50 minutes on a single evaluation. Then Joe waits 3 to 4 weeks for his device. Three separate appointments before a patient even gets scanned for a preventable condition.

All preventable. Every single case.

I think about the grandmother in rural Mississippi who qualifies for diabetic shoes but lives in a zip code where no provider offers them anymore. I think about the construction worker whose employer health plan covers custom orthotics but who has never heard of the benefit because nobody told him. I think about the clinician who went into healthcare to help people and now spends half her day on hold with insurance companies.

My grandfather couldn't fix this with his hands. My father couldn't fix this with his clinics. I am going to fix this with technology. And then I am going to use what we've built to change what's possible for the human body.

Every great platform company starts with a wedge. Amazon started with books. Uber started with black cars. We started with custom insoles.

Everyone told us it was too small a market. Too niche. Too boring. Good. Let them think that.

Insoles sit at the intersection of everything broken in DME. They require a physician prescription, insurance verification, compliance documentation, clinical evaluation, custom manufacturing, and fulfillment. Every step is manual and painful. The economics punish providers because the reimbursement is modest and the administrative overhead eats most of it. That's exactly why only 2% of eligible patients get served, and exactly why it was the right place to prove our thesis. If you can solve the entire workflow for the hardest, most administratively brutal device category in DME, you can solve it for anything.

So we solved all of it.

We built AI agents that automate insurance verification, eligibility checks, document procurement, compliance review, and EHR intake. Every inbound fax gets classified, parsed, matched to patient records, and routed through device-specific workflows. Work that used to take 5 to 10 minutes per referral now takes seconds. We've processed tens of thousands of Medicare claims with industry-leading accuracy and compliance.

We built a clinician experience that reconstructs LiDAR-quality 3D body geometry from standard smartphone video. No app download. No specialized hardware. Works on decade-old Android phones. AI detects pathologies in real time. AI generates evaluation notes. We compress a 48-minute clinician evaluation into under 15 minutes.

We built America's largest production-grade commercial 3D printing operation. Our factory runs 500+ printers out of Peoria, Illinois. 40 employees. We manufacture compliant 3D printed inserts, a regulatory position that took years to earn and cannot be shortcut.

We opened an employer benefits channel where one-third of musculoskeletal claims start in the feet. Where typical MSK benefits see 3 to 5% employee engagement, we consistently achieve 30%+ enrollment. 4x the clinical margin. And every employer becomes a referral engine back into our clinical channel.

We work with the largest orthotic chains in the country. The largest DME provider in the world evaluated every competitor and chose us. The second largest canceled their global technology search to work exclusively with Hike. We've deployed with Fortune 100 employers. Won every head-to-head evaluation against companies with 10x our funding.

The wedge is proven. Now we cross the bridge.

Here is the critical insight that makes this a $100 billion company.

The same AI agents that process a diabetic insole referral can process a wheelchair referral, a CPAP order, a prosthetic limb prescription, or a hospital bed request. The same compliance engine that validates Medicare eligibility for orthotics can validate it for any device category. The fax intelligence, the document procurement, the automated follow-ups, the audit trails: all of it is DME-specific, and all of it transfers across every product category in the $200 billion market.

At the center is StepZero, our AI-orchestrated platform. It ingests fax bundles and splits them by patient. Identifies patients and maps them to existing records or creates new ones. Verifies benefits, procures required documents, sends automated follow-ups, maintains a complete audit trail. Trained on hundreds of thousands of real patient documents. Every AI action logged with confidence scoring and reasoning. The system delivers industry-leading compliance accuracy.

StepZero is the operating system for DME. Our intention is to process all 300 million annual transactions.

On the manufacturing side, we expand from insoles to ankle-foot orthoses, to spinal braces, to cranial helmets, to every custom device category. Same material profiles. Same 3D printing platform. Transferable scanning software. AI-generated CAD from the start. Each new category adds to our data flywheel and deepens our relationships with the largest providers on earth.

For standard DME products we don't manufacture ourselves, we build a marketplace. Every DME vendor, every DME provider, transacting through our platform. We democratize pricing so a single-location clinic gets the same supplier economics as a thousand-location chain. Transaction fees. No markup spread. We become the infrastructure through which the entire DME supply chain flows.

$200 billion in total DME spend. $50 billion in administrative overhead directly addressable by our platform. Add the supply marketplace, the custom manufacturing expansion, and we are looking at a $50 billion+ opportunity in Phase 2 alone.

The bridge transforms Hike from an insole company into the platform that every provider, every supplier, and every payer in America interacts with to move a medical device from prescription to patient.

And here's what makes this truly exciting: every transaction that flows through us, every body scan we perform, every device we manufacture, every compliance workflow we automate, is training data for Phase 3.

This is where I need you to think in decades. Because the destination is bigger than DME. The destination is bigger than healthcare. The destination is a fundamental shift in the relationship between humans and technology.

Bionics is coming. This is not speculation. It is not science fiction. It is happening right now.

The technology for powered body-worn devices is advancing at an exponential rate. Powered exoskeletons already exist in military and industrial applications. Brain-computer interfaces are moving from research labs to clinical trials. The materials science, the battery technology, the sensor arrays, the AI models: all of it is converging simultaneously.

Within 15 years, powered assistive and augmentative devices will be as common as hearing aids. Within 25 years, elective human augmentation will be a consumer category. The question is not whether this happens. The question is who builds the infrastructure to deliver it at scale.

Think about what that requires. You need to be able to scan any part of the human body and create a precise 3D model. You need AI that can generate custom device designs from that scan. You need manufacturing that can produce those devices at industrial scale using additive methods. You need a regulatory infrastructure that has already earned government approval for novel manufactured medical devices. You need clinical relationships with the providers who will prescribe and fit these devices. You need employer distribution channels through which workplace augmentation will flow as a standard benefit. You need a compliance and billing engine that handles the most complex reimbursement environment in any country on earth. And you need a data flywheel that compounds with every scan, every device, every outcome, making every subsequent device better than the last.

And we are building it profitably, because DME pays for the entire journey.

Every custom orthotic we manufacture is training data for powered exoskeletons. Every body scan teaches our models more about human biomechanics. Every ankle-foot orthosis pushes our generative CAD closer to powered ankle devices. Every employer relationship creates a distribution channel for workplace augmentation. Every clinical partnership builds the trust network that will deliver the next generation of human enhancement technology.

The progression is: custom insoles, to custom orthotics and prosthetics, to all DME categories, to powered assistive devices, to consumer bionics. Each phase funds the next. Each phase builds the infrastructure the next phase requires. Each phase makes the subsequent phase inevitable.

There will be a company that becomes the platform through which humans augment their bodies. A company that does for the human body what the smartphone did for human communication. A company that sits at the center of a multi-trillion dollar transformation in how our species relates to physical capability.

I intend for that company to be Hike Medical.

Everyone who's ever underestimated this market, underestimated this company, has been wrong. They will continue to be wrong.

The DME industry has been ignored by technology for decades. Providers still communicate by fax. Patients still wait weeks for devices that should take days. People lose limbs because the system that's supposed to deliver preventive care is too broken to function. That ends with us.

But this is about more than fixing what's broken. This is about building what comes next.

There is a future where a warehouse worker gets fitted for a powered exoskeleton through her employer benefits the same way she gets fitted for safety glasses today. Where a diabetic patient receives a custom device within days of diagnosis, manufactured to her exact geometry by AI. Where a child born without a hand receives a prosthetic designed and printed overnight. Where the human body is no longer a fixed constraint but a platform for continuous enhancement.

That future requires someone to build the infrastructure. The scanning. The AI. The manufacturing. The compliance. The distribution. The clinical trust. The regulatory approvals. The data. All of it.

We are building all of it. Right now. Today.

Hike Medical is the operating system for device-based care. Insoles are the wedge. DME is the bridge. Bionics is the destination. And the destination is one of the most important companies of the next hundred years.

My grandfather started this journey with his hands. My father continued it with his clinics. I will finish it with technology that changes what the human body can do.

2025 was the setup year. 2026 is the launch year.