Tyler Hayes

Tyler Hayes is the co-founder and CEO of Atom Limbs, an AI prosthetics company developing the Atom Touch, a non-invasive, mind-controlled bionic arm with individual finger control.¹ He co-founded Atom in April 2019 alongside Doug Satzger, a former Apple industrial design lead, and Eric Monsef, who created Apple's Core Hardware Team.⁷ Before Atom, Hayes co-founded second-generation Bebo, a live-streaming and esports platform acquired by Amazon's Twitch in June 2019; founded Prime, a health records application that reached number one in the App Store's Health category; and was employee number ten at Disqus, the commenting platform backed by Y Combinator.¹²

Early life and education

Hayes grew up in Minnesota.¹ He attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, graduating in 2008 with a bachelor of arts in psychology with a concentration in neuroscience and a bachelor of arts in Asian studies with a focus on Japanese.⁴¹¹ In a 2021 interview, Hayes said he studied psychology and neuroscience because of a long-standing interest in how the human brain and body work, which he described as leading him toward "the Human Body 2.0 and ultimately ending physical disability."³

As a teenager, Hayes started his first company, Tyler the Techie, providing personal IT services in the Minneapolis--St. Paul area.⁴ He ran the company until age 24, when he sold everything he owned and moved to San Francisco.⁴ After arriving, he ate nothing but pumpkin seeds for a month to avoid spending money before securing his next role.⁴

Disqus (2010--2013)

Hayes joined Disqus in 2010 as its tenth employee, starting as a community support representative.⁴¹⁰ Disqus was a Y Combinator Summer 2007 company backed by Union Square Ventures.¹ Hayes rose to lead both the Product and Community teams before leaving in mid-2013.¹⁰ By the time he departed, Disqus had crossed one billion users and was installed on ten million websites.⁶ He is credited with getting a nap room installed at the company's office.⁴ Disqus was later acquired by Zeta Global.¹

Prime (2013--2016)

In June 2013, Hayes founded Prime, a mobile health records application.¹²¹⁰ The app allowed patients to sync and freely transfer medical records from all their doctors by reverse-engineering hospital patient portals across the country.¹⁶ Hayes personally coded the entire backend infrastructure that scraped and unified records from those portals.⁶ Prime went through the Techstars accelerator and reached number one in the App Store's Health category, with more than 10,000 families using the app to coordinate healthcare.²¹⁰

Hayes has said the motivation for Prime was personal: his father died of lung cancer when Hayes was 24, and he saw firsthand the lack of communication and timely access to information in the healthcare system.⁴ "Everything had to go through the doctor, and there was no easy way to find out what was going on unless I tagged along to every appointment," he wrote.⁴ Prime shut down because the business model did not prove sustainable, but the experience gave Hayes direct exposure to the payer-provider landscape and the structural resistance to change in healthcare.⁶

Bebo (2016--2019)

In March 2016, Hayes joined Shaan Puri and Furqan Rydhan as co-founder and COO of second-generation Bebo, a startup studio in San Francisco.¹⁰ The original Bebo social network had been founded in 2005, acquired by AOL in 2008 for $850 million, then bought back by its founders for $1 million in 2013 after a bankruptcy filing.⁸ Under Puri and Rydhan, the second-generation team built Blab, an ephemeral video messaging app that gained millions of users but shut down after engagement declined, before pivoting into esports tournament organization on Twitch.⁸

Amazon's Twitch acquired Bebo in June 2019 for a reported sum of up to $25 million, beating bids from Facebook and Discord.⁸ The deal included approximately ten employees and Bebo's intellectual property; Twitch planned to use the technology to build its Twitch Rivals esports platform.⁸ Puri became Senior Director of Product of Esports at Twitch.⁸

Hayes described Rydhan as "a super brilliant technologist" whose passion "was contagious," adding that Rydhan encouraged him to build Atom Limbs and subsequently invested in the company twice.³

Atom Limbs (2019--present)

After the Bebo acquisition, Hayes began researching the prosthetics industry while angel investing in longevity companies.⁶ He encountered a Twitch streamer named Mary, a former Army explosive ordnance disposal specialist who had lost both arms in an explosion and played video games with her feet.⁶ When Hayes asked her and other people with limb loss why they did not use prosthetics, the answer was uniform: existing devices were, in Mary's words, "dog shit."⁶

Hayes investigated and found that most upper-limb prosthetics still used hook designs originating from 1912, that more advanced myoelectric arms cost around $195,000 yet offered only pre-programmed grip patterns without individual finger control, and that fewer than one in five arm amputees wore a prosthetic.⁶³ Meanwhile, research prototypes with far greater capability sat in university labs without ever being commercialized.⁶

A friend connected Hayes to Doug Satzger, a former Apple industrial designer who had worked on the Bondi Blue iMac and the first iPhone; the two met for coffee and talked for four hours.⁶ Satzger introduced Eric Monsef, who had created Apple's Core Hardware Team of more than 250 engineers and led the MacBook product line.⁶ The three co-founded Atom Limbs in April 2019.⁷

Hayes saw a video of the Modular Prosthetic Limb, a research prototype from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory built under a $120 million DARPA grant, and contacted the university to create a commercial partnership.⁵ "The work for the last six months has just been moving from what you call a research prototype, which is what they have made, to the development prototype that we're making," he told Fast Company in August 2021.⁵ Atom secured an exclusive option agreement with Johns Hopkins APL to commercialize technology derived from the MPL.⁵

The company's product, the Atom Touch, uses a non-invasive cuff of electrodes placed on the residual limb to read electrical signals from the user's muscles.⁵ An onboard AI system translates those signals into movements of the elbow, wrist, and individual fingers.⁵ "Even when someone has lost or damaged a limb, those nerves are still there and they're still firing into muscles, it's just that there's no real hand left to move," Hayes told Fast Company.⁵

Atom raised $1 million in a single hour from retail investors on Wefunder in November 2021.³ The company has since raised approximately $10.5 million across equity crowdfunding, venture capital, and government grants, and operates from Palo Alto with approximately 15 employees.⁷ Furqan Rydhan's Founders, Inc. is among the company's investors, and Atom works out of Garage, the hardware-focused track at the Fort Mason campus.⁷³

Film

Hayes was the executive producer of Minka, a documentary short directed by Davina Pardo and produced by Andrew Blum about a farmhouse in Japan and the lives of the people who called it home.²⁹ The film won Best Documentary Short at the Florida Film Festival.²