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
References
- Tyler Hayes — Atom(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
- Tyler Hayes — Personal Site(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
- Meet the Prime Team: Tyler Hayes — Medium(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
- This startup is bringing the first mind-controlled prosthetic arm to market — Fast Company(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
- The First Robotic Human Arm with Tyler Hayes of Atom Limbs — Smart Friends Podcast(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
- Atom Limbs — The world's first mind-controlled bionic arm | Founders, Inc.(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
- Amazon's Twitch Acquires Bebo: Details About The Deal You Should Know — Pulse 2.0(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
- Minka — Vimeo(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
- Tyler Hayes — LinkedIn(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
- Tyler Hayes Investing Profile — NFX Signal(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
- Tyler Hayes — Mesh Profile(accessed Apr 18, 2026)