Ekso Bionics

Ekso Bionics builds wearable exoskeletons that take strain off the human body. Founded in 2005 and based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the company makes powered and passive exosuits for construction, manufacturing, and medical rehabilitation. Its industrial models support workers during lifting and overhead tasks, part of a wave of wearables that studies link to sharply fewer strain injuries on jobsites. As construction wrestles with an aging workforce, Ekso’s exoskeletons are moving from pilot programs toward standard personal protective equipment on physically demanding scopes. The company is publicly traded.

Ekso Bionics designs and manufactures wearable robots, the powered and passive exoskeletons that take load off the human body. Founded in 2005 and based in San Rafael, California, the company has grown to a workforce in the range of 51 to 200 and sells into both medical and industrial markets worldwide, applying a single core engineering discipline to two very different problems.

Its medical line is built around rehabilitation. The EksoNR exoskeleton is used in clinical settings to help patients relearn how to walk and move, supporting recovery after strokes, spinal injuries, and other conditions that disrupt mobility. The company’s broader medical mobility work extends that same aim of restoring movement, giving clinicians a tool to guide and reinforce the repetitive practice that rehabilitation depends on.

On the industrial side, the Ekso EVO is worn by workers to support the body during repetitive overhead and lifting tasks, taking on some of the strain that would otherwise accumulate across a shift and contribute to fatigue and injury over time. It reflects a different use of the same idea: rather than helping someone recover lost movement, it protects the movement a healthy worker already has.

Between the rehabilitation and industrial products, Ekso Bionics puts the same exoskeleton engineering to work in a hospital and on a job site alike, and its reach is global rather than tied to any single region or market. That dual footprint is unusual: relatively few companies of its size, in the 51-to-200-employee range, carry a product line spanning clinical rehabilitation and heavy industry from a single engineering base. Nearly two decades on from its 2005 founding, Ekso Bionics continues to develop both sides of that portfolio from its San Rafael home, applying wearable robotics to the shared aim of protecting and restoring how people move. It remains a company defined less by any single device than by that underlying engineering.