Digital health · 3D scanning and custom fit

Standard Cyborg

A Y Combinator startup that printed shower legs for amputees, became the software prosthetists used to design sockets, then became a computer vision SDK. Össur bought the technology in 2020. The company no longer exists.

The thing amputees actually asked for

Before he had a company, Jeff Huber had a question. He interviewed other amputees about what they wanted most from a prosthetic leg.

The answer at the top of the list was not a running blade or a bionic hand. It was a leg for the shower. More than half of amputees are over 50, and a fall on a wet floor is not a small thing. Huber knew the market from the inside: born with fibular hemimelia, he lost his left leg at one year old and in 2015 wore a $23,000 prosthesis.

So the first product was a water leg: a printed plastic frame wrapped by hand in carbon fiber, sold for a few hundred dollars instead of several thousand.

“It’s the first and only prosthetic leg made with a printer that’s worth less than $10,000,” he told TechCrunch in February 2015, when Y Combinator backed him. Standard Cyborg was one person then.

The plaster problem

The leg was never the real target. The socket was.

A socket is the cup that joins a residual limb to the prosthesis, and it decides whether the device is usable or painful. The old way is to wrap the limb in plaster, cast a positive copy and shave it down by hand, up to four hours per patient by Fortune’s 2016 account.

“Most prosthetics are made with a block of plaster and a glorified file,” Huber said. The company’s answer was a tablet, a handheld scanner and a browser: scan the limb, sculpt the socket on screen, print or send the file out, and keep a digital library instead of a shelf of molds.

A solo founder, then two

Huber studied economics and industrial engineering at North Carolina State and left before finishing. He worked at an education startup called KnowIt and then at MightyHive. In June 2014 his wife asked him about the prosthetics idea he had once proposed as a senior research paper and never finished. He bought a printing kit for about $1,000, rented space, and got into Y Combinator that December.

Garrett Spiegel joined as co-founder: biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt, the DoseRight syringe clip at Rice, then the nonprofit product company D-Rev, whose jaundice devices had treated more than 462,000 babies in 52 countries by Vanderbilt’s 2018 count. Forbes put both men on its 2018 30 Under 30 list in healthcare.

By mid 2018 the company said its software was in use across 23 countries on six continents, naming Össur North America, the US Veterans Administration, Doctors Without Borders in Jordan, the Range of Motion Project in Ecuador and LimbForge in Haiti.

The pivot to the pocket

Then Apple shipped the TrueDepth camera. The iPhone X put a depth sensor in millions of pockets and handed developers the raw depth data. Standard Cyborg built a dense reconstruction pipeline on top of it and released a free consumer app, Capture, in late 2018.

The business was the SDK underneath, what Spiegel called the API for the physical world. In September 2019 the clearest example landed: North, the Canadian maker of Focals smart glasses, launched Focals Showroom, a phone app that scanned a face and fitted the glasses without a trip to a store. The company also worked on helmet fitting and shoe sizing, and its SDK shipped models for foot and ear detection.

Two 2020 exits, one of them not its own

On May 8, 2020, Össur, the Icelandic prosthetics maker listed in Copenhagen, announced it had bought the rights to the design and visualization software. It became Össur Design Studio. Terms were not disclosed.

“We are glad this technology has found a home in Össur, so that prosthetists will be able to help even more people with limb loss and limb difference,” Huber said in the joint release.

Seven weeks later Google acquired North, which wound down Focals 1.0 and cancelled Focals 2.0. The showcase customer for the scanning SDK vanished with the product it was scanning for.

The company ran on as a computer vision platform; its homepage still sold edge and cloud tools in June 2021. By May 2022 the same address read: Standard Cyborg has been retired. The SDK went out under the MIT license with one condition, that commercial use in prosthetics was barred until January 1, 2023. The readme on the surviving repository is blunter than any press release. “The company no longer exists, but in its death, it was able to open-source this 3D scanning and analysis framework under the MIT license.”

Huber went on to co-found Chroma, an open source database for AI retrieval. It raised an $18 million seed round in 2023.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the technology worked well enough that a listed manufacturer bought it and still runs it six years later, and that strangers still build scanning apps on the open source remains. The business underneath did not survive the move from selling to prosthetists to selling to developers.

What to watch

• Össur Design Studio, live in June 2026, one of the few acquired startup products still in daily clinical use under a new owner.
• The MIT licensed SDK. The prosthetics carve out expired on January 1, 2023, and third party build guides were still appearing in 2025.
• The patent, which outlived the company. No source saved here establishes who holds it now.
• The founders. Huber co-founded Chroma, which raised $18 million in 2023.

In their words

Related companies

• Zenflow: Also in Medical Devices. A small nitinol coil that props open the prostatic urethra, delivered through a flexible scope and removable at any time
• InnoVein: Also in Medical Devices. A prosthetic valve for the deep veins of the leg, aimed at a disease with no cure and at a device category that has never reached market
• HelpWear: Also in Medical Devices. A Toronto company building an arm worn ECG monitor meant to be kept on for months rather than days
• VenoStent: Also in Medical Devices. A bioabsorbable polymer sleeve that a surgeon slips over a newly built dialysis fistula and leaves behind to dissolve

Sources

1. Public recordSEC full text search for Standard Cyborg, all forms, no resultSEC EDGAR · Sep 23, 2026
2. Public recordPatent assigned to Standard Cyborg, Inc., 3D scanning toolkitJustia Patents · Sep 23, 2026
3. Public recordStandardCyborgSDK readme and licenseGitHub · Sep 23, 2026
4. Public recordstandardcyborg.com, platform version and retired noticeInternet Archive · Jun 2021, May 2022
5. Public recordossurdesignstudio.com sign in pageInternet Archive · Jun 6, 2026
6. Public recordFDA, ClinicalTrials.gov, NIH, NSF and PubMed name searchesFederal databases · Sep 23, 2026
7. IndependentYC Backs Standard Cyborg, A Startup Building Affordable Artificial LimbsTechCrunch · Feb 9, 2015
8. IndependentThis founder had his leg amputated at age oneBusiness Insider · Mar 27, 2015
9. IndependentThis Company Wants To Disrupt How Artificial Limbs Are MadeFortune · May 19, 2016
10. IndependentGarrett Spiegel, BE’10, Systems-Level ThinkerVanderbilt University · Nov 19, 2018
11. IndependentÖssur Acquires Technology From Standard CyborgThe O&P EDGE · May 13, 2020
12. IndependentGoogle acquires North, whose Focals 2.0 won’t shipTechCrunch · Jun 30, 2020
13. IndependentChroma bags $18M for its embedding databaseSiliconANGLE · Apr 6, 2023
14. InterviewChroma’s Jeff Huber on vector databases and production AIMadrona · Sep 5, 2023
15. IndependentStandard Cyborg, 30 Under 30 profileForbes · 2018
16. IndependentSeed round record, $2.4M announcedCrunchbase · Dec 11, 2018
17. CompanyÖssur Acquires Scanning and Design Technology from Standard CyborgÖssur and Embla Medical · May 8, 2020
18. CompanyAnnouncing the launch of Focals ShowroomStandard Cyborg on Medium · Sep 18, 2019
19. CompanyStandard Cyborg company page, YC W15Y Combinator · Sep 21, 2026