Shay Pilcher is on a mission…and there’s no stopping her    

NVA company founder is doing what many before her deemed impossible 

The first thing to understand about Shay Pilcher, founder of Auburn New Venture Accelerator company Archangel Industries, LLC and a research engineer at Auburn’s Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, is that she is unabashedly unfazed and inherently undeterred by the word “no” when it comes to “helping protect those whose job it is to protect us,” as she puts it. 

Her mission? To design, develop and manufacture lightweight electronic power assist systems that provide additional, carefully calibrated muscle strength and endurance for military combatants while packing heavy gear or traveling long distances at a rapid pace. Senior decision-makers in the defense industry and those that fund it are taking notice of Shay and her team’s efforts, as evidenced by a recent investment in the company – their first formal seed round funding. 

The United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), in particular, is interested in the amplified strength and extended range of motion her designs and underlying technology offer to warfighters. The same benefits apply to law enforcement officers, firefighters and other first responders. 

Recognition of her diligent efforts to deliver these extraordinarily valuable capabilities comes at a time when entities much larger and infinitely better resourced than Archangel have decided it is just too hard to do what she is doing – despite their many attempts. These multi-billion-dollar enterprises have concluded that it is just too expensive and technically unfeasible to accomplish this critical mission using the traditional approaches they have employed, and which have failed to deliver after decades – and hundreds of millions of dollars – spent trying. 

Interestingly, says Shay, these legacy defense contractors are right – traditional approaches won’t work.  

That’s why Shay and her team are moving ahead with a totally different strategy and an innovative design model that leverages the very latest in kinetics and biomechanical engineering technology melded together into a state-of-the art, revolutionary portfolio of solutions. 

The Vision 

Shay’s story, as outlined in last year’s NVA feature “Ironman, Legos, and a Passion for Change,” started with a chance encounter she had in a Walmart with a woman and her small son. The woman’s husband and the little boy’s father was killed while he was serving overseas, and the boy wanted to get an Ironman Legos set because, as the mother intimated to Shay, “he told me that maybe if daddy had had an Ironman suit, he could have fought off the bad guys who killed him.” 

And so it began.  

The Solution 

Shay and her team set out to design and develop individually tailored mobility assist systems that meet and exceed the unprecedented level of performance enhancement required by the USSOCOM – home of the most elite, technologically advanced fighting forces in the world. The capabilities of the company’s integrated kinetic and biomechanical technology design simply can’t be delivered by incremental improvements in the kind of rigid, exoskeleton-based robotic systems used in commercial applications for comparatively simple tasks such as moving boxes in warehouses and on loading docks.  

First responders – law enforcement officers, firefighters and others tasked with protecting us all – are also in the company’s future customer mix. Down the road, Archangel also intends to target medical services providers, physical therapists and orthotics specialists – even rehabilitation organizations for athletes and individuals recovering from mobility-impacting medical procedures. 

The Investment  

Shay’s first formal seed funding came as the result of another chance encounter, when a member of one of the College of Engineering’s Alumni Advisory Councils heard Shay’s story on the College’s #Ginning Podcast. He was talking to his wife about what he’d heard, saying “Pilcher, Pilcher, I’ve heard that name before.” “That’s my brother’s best friend’s daughter,” his wife said. 

“So, it turns out that her brother and my dad were very close friends when I was growing up,” says Shay. “He texted me shortly thereafter and basically just said, “I need you to call me.”  

She did, and so launched the next phase of her entrepreneurial journey. 

The NVA sat down recently with Shay to catch up on her progress, the company’s first major investment, and what’s next for this driven advocate for giving those who protect us everything they need to accomplish that critical assignment. 

NVA: Let’s start with what happened next as a result of that call from out of the blue from Skip. 

Pilcher: First off, his text literally freaked me out. I mean, “I need you to call me” sounded ominous coming from someone I grew up knowing as a police officer friend of my dad. I thought to myself, “Oh no, who died?” I started texting him and my family, asking frantically “Is everyone okay?” 

Thankfully, he replied, “No, it’s nothing like that. I just want to get you in contact with my brother-in-law who might be able to help you achieve your mission.” 

NVA: Walk us through, if you will, what that connection with a member of the Auburn Family has meant to you and Archangel Industries. 

Pilcher: Mike Rowland has been one of the most instrumental people contributing to our success so far. Getting to know him and seeing just how much the Auburn Family actually means to people like me has been phenomenal. He’s taken us to several Department of Defense events where we have been introduced to some extremely senior military officers and defense appropriations administrators who are keenly interested in what we’re doing and willing to help as much as they can.  

NVA: What is his connection to the military and defense industry? Where did he get these top-tier relationships with so many decision makers that he shared with you? 

Pilcher: He’s on the Board of the Spookstock Foundation, an organization whose mission is to help Shadow Warriors and their families thrive.  They host two major fundraisers each year that support Gold Star Families – those who have experienced the loss of a parent as the result of active-duty military service – by funding their children’s education, from preschool through graduate or professional school.  

I’ve had the opportunity to meet a lot of these kids. They’re amazing. You need to hear their stories and the stories of their parents who were lost in combat to fully appreciate the challenges they face and why we’re doing everything we can to dramatically reduce the number of service members who die and the families who have to go through all that pain. 

NVA: Now that you have secured this first significant investment, what’s next? What will that money go towards? Are there any conditions attached? 

Pilcher: The short answer to what we’re doing with the money is engineering and prototype development. 

The more detailed answer, which also speaks to the question of conditions attached to our funding, is that we will be following a two-step prototype development process over the next six months according to set milestone delivery dates. 

The first milestone is to develop a fully operational mechanical “sleeve” – an actual physical device – for the hand, fingers and wrist that replicates primary hand functionality, including grasp, grip, individual finger operation, etc. What the muscles and tendons do, only better. 

We’ll get that down, make sure we can build it, and that it articulates the way it’s supposed to – but there will be no method of communicating between a human and that complex mechanical device – not yet.  

This first milestone is due in December, and we are well on our way to beating that timeline. 

The second milestone, due three months after that, is to develop the biometrics and biomechanical interface that enables this intricate mechanical device to communicate with signals from your body – replicating typical human operation and performance, but with an “assist” of strength and endurance. 

Now, instead of pulling a handful of cords, pressing a button or having some other type of motion activation, your body sends the signals directly to the device. The end result is more like a second skin as opposed to yet another piece of equipment these already overloaded warfighters have to wear. 

NVA: Why the two steps, one after the other? Why break them up when they seem to be so tightly entwined? 

Pilcher: The thought process behind splitting them up was that communicating between the two systems – between the mechanical device and the biometric signaling system that drives it – will be a heavy lift. It will take a lot of fine tuning of the sensors, with lots of coding involved, which is difficult – especially when you’re trying to pick up and onboard signals from another system entirely. 

Our thinking is that if we can get the system to function mechanically the way we want it to first, we’ve accomplished 50% of that challenge – we know what signals the mechanical device needs to receive in order to perform the tasks asked of it. 

NVA: The last question we have for you is – why hasn’t this been done before?  

Pilcher: It isn’t for lack of trying, it’s just that the traditional, incremental development-based approaches favored by large conglomerates have fallen woefully short – there’s too much baggage being dragged along in trying to make old, outdated models lighter, quicker, cheaper. 

The problem is that most are still sticking with their embedded designs, perhaps adding pneumatic bladders, servos or other slightly more advanced elements. But these components still take up way too much real estate on the body. They still require too much power density to get things to work correctly.  

That’s the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result? So clearly, we’ve got to try something different. 

That’s why we decided from the onset to do the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing – all based on this crazy idea of mine that it should all be based on the very type of innovative, next generation technology I’m so deeply interested in. 

Yes, we are walking down a pretty difficult road, but I think that that’s what makes it all worthwhile. 

To learn more about Archangel Industries, contact Shay Pilcher at spilcher@archangelind.com 

To learn more about Auburn’s New Venture Accelerator, contact Lou Bifano at loubifano@auburn.edu or visit their website HERE.