What if your t-shirt could help heal your sports injury?

When a then-teenaged Timothy Brownstone was at his first track meet as a junior international athlete running the 200m sprint, he busted his knee – a particularly difficult injury to rehabilitate because of the poor blood circulation to the area. His desire to get back to the track seeded an interest in bio-responsive technologies that could helpe the body heal faster.

What if there was a fabric that didn’t just “wick” moisture or maximise breathability, but helps rehabilitate and heal you? That sounded pretty good to an injured young sprinter.

This laid the foundations for what today is Kymira, an advanced textiles company producing sports apparel — t-shirts, leggings, shorts, socks, hoodies etc. —  from fabric with imbedded infrared technology that ostensibly helps oxygenation, energy production of the user’s cells, as well as helping regulate temperature and reduce soreness.

Today, you can find it kitting out organisations including the Houston Texans, Princeton University, Everton Football Club, and England Rugby, to name just a few. Through its participation in Comcast NBC Universal’s accelerator programme, it is also looking to supercharge future partnerships.

Genesis

Brownstone researched the use of infrared technology for would healing while at the University of Reading — the only school he could find in the UK that would let him conduct the research he wanted at the undergraduate level.

This research eventually led to the foundation of Kymira, which is not technically a spin-out. Though the technology is based on his university research, Brownstone built the company parallel to his studies, and consequently did not having to go through tech transfer offices or dealing with equity or IP issues.

Brownstone was impatient to get the technology onto the market so he opted to turn it into a business as early as possible. While the ultimate goal has been to break into the heavily-regulated medical space this can take time. In the meantime, Brownstone reasoned, a tangential market like sports apparel could provide income and validation of the technology.

“I kind of started the business with a question of: could you use a lesser or non-regulated market – in this instance, the sporting market – to bring forward the point of commercialisation validated on that market, generate revenue and reinvest that into the ongoing medical research, validation and regulatory work,” says Brownstone.

Provided you’re developing in the right way, says Brownstone, pursuing your goal via a less regulated market can give you a not-so-intangible advantage over others in that market. Setting your bar at the medical field means that you’ll be working towards that goal, continuously improving, as opposed to falling into the trap that some other wearables company have done, where they saturate the market then plateau. A medical technology applied to, and developed via, sports may in theory have a better chance than something developed for sports that then wants to break into the medical field.

How it works

The way Kymira’s core technology works is by directing infrared light to activate a protein in the mitochondria of our cells that controls the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) – the “fuel” that provides cells with energy. Think of it like opening the gates for more fuel to get into your cells’ power plant.

It does this through what it calls a “bio-ceramic” composite, a formulation of minerals ground to around 1 micron in particle size — roughly 100^th the width of a human hair. This material acts as a broad-spectrum absorber — absorbing from the UV spectrum through to the visible light spectrum.

“Imagine an atom, with a nucleus and the electron shells around the outside.  A photon of visible light, for example, comes in and it hits the atoms of the composite. That causes electronic excitation, which is destabilizing for the molecule. So it wants to get that energy out,” says Brownstone.  

“Between seven and 18% of [that energy], depending on our material, will be lost as thermal heat energy, and the remainder will be emitted through a specifically targeted region of the infrared [light] spectrum, which has been targeted based on the physiological effect that has on the body, causing different chemical reactions, which then leads to increases in circulation, analgesic benefits and cellular benefits.”

The challenge was in how to incorporate the composite into the fabric itself. You couldn’t just have the composite on the surface of the fabric – wounds, which tend to be open, can’t risk being contaminated, and buying something that would lose its effect after several washes was a non-starter.

The solution came in novel manufacturing techniques. Brownstone came across a textiles technology business in California called Hologenix, which had been working on textiles with hollow fibres – ideal for housing bioceramic content.

“Innovate where innovation is required or necessary, but if you’ve got something you genuinely think is the best in market, then partner and collaborate,” he says.

Raising cash

Kymira was initially funded with £2,000 from Brownstone’s student loan, followed by some bootstrapping. Its first capital injection came in 2018, then its first substantive raise came in 2021 to the tune of £3.5m. The company’s investors include the likes of Henley Business Angels and K50 Ventures, as well as grant funding from InnovateUK.

It has not always been easy, though, as the scrutiny on Kymira’s scientific claims, particularly from prospective clients, was intense. Eventually, the conversation stopped being about the technology, which was largely validated, but about whether people are actually using it, or what the compliance looked like.

Much of the growth was achieved through a form of word of mouth. Once the first few dominoes fell over – professional and collegiate teams – then it made it progressively easier to get more on board.

“Today, if any college, NFL team, NBA team, MLB team, you name it, has a desire to work with us, and they want to take us out of the conversation and just speak to what people genuinely think of us, the likelihood is we can give them a host of people to speak to.”

In the early days, the heaviest scrutiny was on the science, which Brownstone welcomed. At the time, the challenge was in winning over the gatekeepers and communicating the science in a readily digestible way.

“There’s never been an issue with giving depth if someone wanted to ask questions and go through all the different metabolic processes. That’s always been fine.  But when you’re speaking to a room of five individuals, all of whom have an opinion and they’ve got different degrees of education or interest, that was the bit that I personally struggled with because I was a scientist learning about business and being commercial,” says Brownstone.   

As the business has grown, the brand’s market positioning and reputation have smoothed over that challenge. The next challenge came in moving from “land and expand” – doing small deals and growing those individual partnerships – to hitting critical mass. Kymira could have been popular with directors of medical or performance at their organisations, but business offices may have, for example, been more concerned about the Nike sponsorship.

Now, the people Kymira speaks to tend to be the athletic directors, the general managers or head coaches, each of which requires their own approach and language.

“If I’m speaking to the head coach, they’ve got 10 minutes because they’re that busy.  It has to be in little digestible chunks to grab their attention, typically because they will champion us down to the director of ops or the equipment manager to actually get it done,” says Brownstone.

Coaches aren’t just champions, either – in the collegiate game, they’re also the ultimate budget holders and can drive buy-in in very tangible ways.

“One of the most powerful adoption-building moments I’ve had was I was doing an ‘ask me anything’ with the athletes on the Princeton women’s basketball team – the first women’s basketball team in the nation to start wearing Kymira – during a campus visit,” says Brownstone.

“There were a lot of questions, but eventually, the question was asked: Hey coach,  what do you think of Kymira? And coach pulls up her pant leg and she’s got her Kymira tights on underneath. So did two of her assistant coaches. And you just saw nodding heads like that was the conviction that those athletes needed.”

Accelerating

Earlier this year, Kymira was one of 10 companies taking part in the fourth cohort of Comcast NBCUniversal’s six-month sports tech accelerator programme, which is done with accelerator Boomtown. The programme offers partnerships with major sporting organisations around the world, including the Premier League. NBC Sports, Sky Sports, NASCAR, PGA Tour and more.

Boomtown had initially approached Kymira and encouraged them to apply. While Brownstone receives similar reachouts frequently, this one stood out for being what he refers to as an “acsellerator”, because it’s all about building commercial traction, and being supported in doing bigger deals at a higher frequency.

“By the time you leave the programme, you should be commercially further forward than you would have been otherwise, and certainly that’s been our experience,” he says.

“Would some of the deals that they’ve supported on have happened anyway? Yes, possibly.  But a number of them probably are three to five times the size that they would have been if we’d just been doing it on our own.”

Participating in the cohort has, among other things, streamlined dealmaking as it smoothed the due diligence process and let customers jump into deals with both feet as opposed to just dipping their toe in the water first.

The long road

“Speaking long term, I don’t think sports will be the largest market, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be one of the most important.  The sports market today is, as it was intended to be, very much the sandbox. We have great marketing assets that come from it, we have technological validation, we have revenues,” he says.

Selling to elite sports teams is ultimately a relatively small market, but the company is building a secondary market in selling directly to non-professional sports enthusiasts. An eve bigger opportunity for Kymira lies outside of sports – which only around 35% of people engage in regularly.

“For us to scale to a multi-billion dollar business,  we really need to be speaking to the other 65 percent as well,” says Brownstone.

The fine details of the roadmap into the medical sector is still a work in progress but would involve eventually getting classification – depending on the jurisdiction – as a therapeutic or medical device, as their infrared technology is today in some places.

For the bio-responsive technology, the approvals process is fairly standard. Kymira is also working on bio-monitoring technology for both sports and medical purposes, including adding motion capture capabilities to the garments, making clothes that track heart rate, respiration or oxygenation, or even foetal monitoring. Each of these steps will be more rigorous in terms of what needs to be provided to the regulators.

“Because ultimately, the goal is that one day our technologies are saving lives and we don’t want to get that wrong.”

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You can also see Tim Brownstone speaking on a panel on sports tech on The Next Wave webinar series here.