Supply Chain / Medical DME · Deep dive

Hike Medical

San Francisco healthtech that raised $22.5M in combined seed + Series A on August 25, 2026 to turn orthotics, prosthetics and DME — a category still routed by fax, foam boxes and phone calls — into a single referral-to-dispense platform, with an in-house 3D-printing farm in Peoria to make the devices.

emerging

The question that decides it: Does a vertically integrated referral-to-dispense platform (Hike's software + Peoria 3D-print farm) win in O&P and DME before Cohere-style prior-auth AI, Epic-native referral rails and Hanger's PE-funded digital effort collapse the workflow-only surface — and can Hike's take-rate-plus-device-margin economics survive a Medicare fee schedule where competitive bidding and the December 2025 CMS-1828-F prior-auth exemption program cut both sides of the sandwich?

My take ★★ Very interesting ★ Interesting − Maybe ✗ Not interesting

Snapshot

Hike Medical is a San Francisco healthtech company that announced $22.5M of combined seed and Series A funding on August 25, 2026, led by Max Altman at Saga Ventures with Indicator Ventures, Fifth Down Capital, RiverPark Ventures, strategic investor Orthofeet, and angels including Monaco CEO Sam Blond and former Patriots head coach and Super Bowl champion Jerod Mayo. Founded in 2022 by brothers Aadi and Amit Bhanti and childhood friend Steven Chacko, the company began as a mobile-scan custom-insole business for diabetic and podiatric patients, and used the August 25, 2026 round to reposition itself as the referral-to-dispense operating system for the entire orthotics, prosthetics and durable medical equipment category. The wager: US O&P (roughly $2.6B in 2025 per market.us) plus DME (a broader ~$60B category) still runs on fax machines, foam boxes and phone tag; a vertically integrated software plus 3D-print manufacturing stack — Hike’s Peoria “Hike Lab” and Soleforge farm claim to be the largest orthotic 3D-print facility in the US — can collapse the workflow. The company has publicly signalled a $50-75M Series B target by year-end 2026.

Founding story

Aadi Bhanti is a third-generation orthotics and prosthetics operator; his father Amit Bhanti has spent his career as a clinician with Comprehensive Prosthetics & Orthotics, and Aadi has told trade press that O&P runs in his family across three generations. Steven Chacko is Aadi’s childhood friend from the same Peoria, IL manufacturing community, and had already built a custom-insole prototype at insoles.ai before folding it into what became Hike Medical in 2022. The founding conviction is a specific one: everyone who grew up around a Peoria factory floor knows that foot pain drives absenteeism and turnover, and that the workflow to get a diabetic worker a custom orthotic — the referral, the eligibility check, the foam-box impression, the six-week fabrication wait, the dispense visit — is broken in every step. The three co-founders started with the insole because that is the highest-volume, most-standardizable slice of the O&P workload, then extended out into prosthetics and DME once the mobile scan, the AI SOAP note and the in-house 3D-print rails were live.

In August 2026 the company also hired Jerry Tang, previously SVP of Global Operations at Flexport and COO at Dandy (the digital dental lab that has become the reference template for direct-to-clinician custom manufacturing), as chief operating officer. That hire is the loudest signal of intent: Hike is not building a SaaS referral platform, it is building a Dandy for feet and eventually a Dandy for the rest of DME.

How it works

The workflow starts inside a podiatry, primary-care or O&P clinic. A clinician opens Hike on any smartphone, captures a proprietary 3D scan of the foot in under 60 seconds — no dedicated hardware, no foam box, no plaster — and lets Hike’s guided workflow generate a Medicare-compliant SOAP note and evaluation before the patient leaves the room. The company’s own clinical marketing claims the scan-to-note flow reclaims 15-20 minutes per patient. Every document is automatically checked against payer policy, so the audit trail is built in rather than reconstructed after a denial. The single order flows through one portal for shoes, custom orthotics, modifications and now broader DME lines, one invoice, one delivery-tracking view.

The device then hits Hike Lab in Peoria, IL — a 3D-print farm the company describes as the largest orthotic 3D-print facility in the US — where the file is queued to a print, hand-finished and inspected, and shipped back to the clinic in roughly five business days versus the two-to-four-week status quo. That vertical integration is the load-bearing part of the model: without owning fabrication, the platform is just another e-prescribing rail on top of the same slow suppliers.

Product and business overview

Three surfaces, in order of maturity. First, the clinical workflow: mobile scan, guided SOAP note, payer validation, e-order — the surface that lets a clinician run 15-20 more minutes of billable time per day. Second, the Hike Lab / Soleforge manufacturing back-end: custom insoles printed and finished in Peoria on ~5-business-day turnaround, with FDA and PDAC-approved diabetic inserts in the catalog. Third, the extension launched with the August 25, 2026 round: the same referral-to-dispense rails applied to broader O&P and DME line items, using Orthofeet as commercial partner and strategic investor to seed the shoe-and-shoe-modification side, and named health-system partners like OSF HealthCare providing the demand pull.

The employer-and-health-system channel is deliberate. On November 8, 2024, Hike announced a program with OSF HealthCare to bring custom insoles to over 25,000 mission partners (OSF’s term for employees) — the mission being musculoskeletal-pain reduction as a workforce-productivity lever, not a claim-based reimbursement play. That is a very different go-to-market from Parachute or Tomorrow Health, which route through payers.

Business model and pricing

Hike does not publish a rate card. Reconstructed from the workflow and channel: the company monetizes on three legs. One, the device margin from Peoria-manufactured custom insoles and orthotics — a real manufacturing-margin business, priced against Medicare’s DMEPOS fee schedule for HCPCS codes like A5513 and L3020 rather than against a SaaS subscription. Two, an employer / health-system contract (OSF HealthCare-style) where the buyer is a self-insured payer or employer paying a per-mission-partner or per-eligible-population rate for insole access as a benefit. Three, referral-workflow software fees to O&P and DME clinics that use the platform to route orders, though the company has not disclosed whether this is per-seat, per-order or take-rate. The Staples listing of the “HIKE Medical Move-A.I. Diabetic Custom Insoles Redemption Kit” (SKU HKE20239) at retail is a fourth, direct-to-consumer surface layered on top.

The unstated economics: because Hike owns the print, its take-rate on the workflow can be zero and it can still make money on every referral it fulfils. That is the reason the vertical integration matters — a software-only competitor cannot price at zero take-rate and survive.

Traction over time

Hike has not published referral volume, dispense count or revenue. The most concrete unit-level number in the public record is the sub-60-second scan and 5-business-day dispense turnaround, versus a status quo of foam-box impressions and 2-4 week custom fabrication times widely cited in O&P trade press.

Market analysis

Two markets stack. US O&P — the narrower category — is pegged at around $2.65B in 2025 by market.us’s US Prosthetics and Orthotics report, with a 4.9% CAGR and North America holding 43.3% of a global $6.89-9.66B market depending on which 2025 report you trust (Precedence Research, Towards Healthcare, market.us). US DME is a much larger category, commonly cited in the $60B+ range across CMS and industry sources; SNS Insider’s 2024 DME report puts the global DME market at similar orders of magnitude with steady mid-single-digit growth. Provider-side pain is structural: 67% of healthcare providers surveyed in 2024 spend more than 10 hours a week managing supply chain issues, and 49% say patient treatments have been delayed as a result (TechTarget / GHX summaries of 2024 provider surveys).

Two structural forces widen the wedge. First, CMS’s December 2025 CMS-1828-F final rule created a prior-auth exemption pathway for compliant DMEPOS suppliers, which raises the value of any platform that can prove billing-compliance and audit-readiness on referral. Second, Medicare’s July 2024 microprocessor-controlled-knee coverage expansion is dragging more prosthetic categories onto Medicare fee schedules, which increases the addressable population but also intensifies the reimbursement discipline Hike’s platform is designed for.

Competitive intel

Full list in frontmatter. The device incumbents — Hanger (925+ clinics, ~$1.7B revenue, Patient Square-owned since October 2022 at $1.25B enterprise value), Ottobock (€4.2B Frankfurt IPO October 9, 2025 on €1.6B 2024 revenue), Össur ($800M 2026 revenue, ~$2B market cap), Enovis / DJO ($2.25B 2025 revenue, DonJoy at ~$1.1B) — own the physical devices and the surgeon-and-clinic relationships Hike wants to intermediate. The workflow-only startups — Parachute Health (~220K clinicians, ~3K supplier locations claimed, only ~$5.5M disclosed seed) and Tomorrow Health ($25M A in April 2021, ~$60M B in July 2022, Horizon Suite launched January 2026) — attack the same fax-and-phone friction from the payer / clinician side but do not own manufacturing. The prior-auth automators — Cohere Health ($200M raised through a $90M Temasek-led Series C in May 2025) — commoditize one specific pain point Hike currently sells against.

The most important structural competitor is not a company but a fee schedule. Medicare’s DMEPOS competitive bidding program compresses prices on high-volume codes, which shrinks device margin on exactly the SKUs Hike prints in Peoria; if bidding rounds catch the diabetic-insert code categories, the vertically integrated model gets squeezed from the reimbursement side even as it wins on workflow.

History and evolution

The timeline is short. Company incorporated in 2022. First public pilot marketing surfaced in 2023 around diabetic and workplace-foot-pain populations, tied to the Peoria manufacturing community the founders came from. FDA and PDAC approvals for diabetic inserts landed in 2024, along with the Hike Lab / Soleforge 3D-print operation. On November 8, 2024, the OSF HealthCare partnership formalized the employer / health-system channel with a 25,000+ mission-partner deployment. Through 2025 and into early 2026, the company built the guided clinical workflow and payer-validation layers. In 2026 the strategic COO hire (Jerry Tang, ex-Flexport, ex-Dandy) preceded the platform repositioning; on August 25, 2026 the $22.5M combined seed + Series A was announced with a stated Series B target of $50-75M by year-end 2026. No public pivots, layoffs or leadership departures on record.

What people say

The case for. The most concrete third-party validation is the OSF HealthCare deal (PRNewswire, November 8, 2024) — a 15-hospital, 25,000+ mission-partner deployment inside a Midwestern health system is a hard reference customer for any healthtech seed-stage company to land. Hike’s own clinical marketing claims a 60-second scan and 15-20 minute per-patient time savings via the guided SOAP-note workflow (hikemedical.com/clinical, 2026), which matches the operational logic O&P and podiatry practices describe when they talk about referral bottlenecks. The Podiatry Management “Profiles in Excellence 2026” writeup (podiatrym.com PDF, March 2026 issue) gives the founders a trade-press platform the incumbents rarely publish under. Investor pedigree also matters: Saga Ventures is a $125M Fund I (closed March 2024 per Forbes) run by Max Altman, and the strategic Orthofeet participation gives Hike a direct commercial line into a real orthopedic-shoe distribution network.

The complaints. Third-party customer criticism is essentially non-existent as of August 2026, which is itself the complaint — Hike has no meaningful G2, Capterra or Reddit r/CPO_Prosthetics footprint, and the O&P provider community is famously slow to adopt new referral rails. The DME-referral graveyard is real: Parachute Health has spent almost a decade with a $5.5M seed and remains sub-scale; Olive AI, once valued at $4B on adjacent workflow-automation for payers, collapsed in 2023 after failing to convert product usage into contracted revenue. That history should be the base rate. The vertical integration into Peoria manufacturing raises capital intensity and inventory risk in exactly the category — DMEPOS competitive bidding — where CMS is most aggressive about compressing margin. The founder concentration (two brothers plus a childhood friend) plus a $50-75M Series B target inside four months of announcing the A is an aggressive posture that a downturn-priced DME market will punish quickly if the OSF-style anchor customers don’t compound.

Outlook: the open question

Answered yes if: Hike converts the OSF template into three or more additional health-system-employer deployments in FY27, ships prosthetics and non-insole DME line items on the same rails without ballooning WIP inventory in Peoria, and gets to $20-40M ARR before the Series B priced round closes — turning the vertical integration into a moat rather than a working-capital problem. Answered no if: Cohere Health’s prior-auth AI collapses the CMS-1828-F exemption pathway into a commodity, Hanger’s PE-funded digital effort narrows referral latency inside its 925+ clinic network, and Medicare competitive bidding cuts insole and orthotic reimbursement enough that Hike’s device margin can no longer subsidize a zero-take-rate workflow. Both outcomes are on the table. The August 25, 2026 round is priced for the first; a shrewd short would take the second.

How to attack it

The specific wedge: compete on the exact opposite topology — a software-only, payer-first referral routing layer that lives inside Epic and Cerner as an app, prices at a per-referral fee to health plans not clinicians, and uses Össur, Enovis and Hanger themselves as fulfillment. Hike’s bet is that owning fabrication is defensible. Attack that by making fabrication irrelevant: if a payer plugs the referral into an SLA-graded network of existing O&P and DME suppliers, the payer captures the savings without funding a Peoria factory. That is a very short sales cycle inside a UnitedHealthcare or Elevance’s DME benefits team.

The specific weaknesses to exploit:

1. Manufacturing concentration. One Peoria facility is single-site risk in a category (DMEPOS) that is regionally regulated; a distributed print network partnered with existing labs eats that flank.
2. Prior-auth commoditization. Cohere Health raised $90M in May 2025 for exactly this — if payers standardize on Cohere for DME prior auth, Hike loses one of its most-cited value drivers.
3. CMS competitive bidding exposure. Every diabetic-insert HCPCS code hit by a bidding round compresses the device-margin subsidy for Hike’s zero-take-rate workflow.
4. Thin trade-press and clinician-community footprint. No visible r/CPO_Prosthetics or O&P Almanac editorial coverage as of August 2026; DME buyers are relationship-first, and Hanger has decades of them.
5. Founder concentration. Two brothers plus a childhood friend and a very new COO is a small operating bench for a $50-75M Series B in a regulated category.
6. Payer channel is missing. OSF is a health-system-employer, not a claims-based payer; the winning DME referral rail eventually has to route through Medicare Advantage plans, which Tomorrow Health has been building toward since 2021.

A well-funded attacker with $40-60M, a Cohere-style prior-auth stack, an Epic app-orchard listing and a UnitedHealthcare Optum-DME partnership could pressure Hike inside 18 months.

Adjacent-segment play

Same referral-and-fabrication rails, different device category. The obvious adjacency is dental — Dandy has already proven that a mobile-scan-to-lab-to-clinic loop is a venture-scale business in dental, and Hike’s COO hire (Jerry Tang, ex-Dandy) is a signal the founders know it. Hike is unlikely to attack Dandy directly, but a same-team spinout for audiology and hearing aids — a category with mobile-app fitting, custom 3D-printed ear moulds and a rapidly consolidating retail landscape (Amplifon, Demant, Sonova) — is a natural extension.

Second adjacency: workplace injury and workers’ comp DME. The OSF program is essentially a workforce-productivity play with insoles as the wedge; the same distribution — self-insured employer, at-work-injury program — can push knee braces, back braces and post-op orthoses through the same platform. Sedgwick, Gallagher Bassett and other workers’ comp TPAs are the buyers.

Third adjacency: veterans and VA-channel prosthetics. The VA is the single largest US buyer of prosthetics, with a fee schedule and audit posture that rewards platforms designed for Medicare compliance. Där der wedge does not generalize: consumer wellness footwear. Direct-to-consumer custom insoles have been tried by Wiivv, Upstep, Superfeet and dozens of others; unit economics without a clinician referral or an employer payer never work.

Sources and further reading

• Hike Medical Raises $22.5M to Modernize the Medical Device Supply Chain from Referral to Device Delivery — BusinessWire, Aug 25, 2026
• Hike Medical raises $22.5M Series A to fix medical device supply chain — Dealroom News, Aug 2026
• Hike Medical Raises $22.5 Million in Seed, Series A Funding — HME Business, Aug 2026
• Hike Medical and OSF HealthCare Join Forces to Bring Cutting-Edge Foot Care to Over 25,000 Mission Partners — PRNewswire, Nov 8, 2024
• Hike Medical Adds AI to AM to 3D Print Custom Orthotics — 3DPrint.com, 2024
• Profiles in Excellence 2026 — Podiatry Management, March 2026
• Hanger, Inc. Completes Acquisition by Patient Square Capital — BusinessWire, Oct 3, 2022
• Ottobock Shares Rise After Biggest German IPO of 2025 — Bloomberg, Oct 9, 2025
• Cohere Health Secures $90M Series C — PRNewswire, May 2025
• Tomorrow Health Launches Horizon Suite — BusinessWire, Jan 21, 2026
• US Prosthetics and Orthotics Market Trend Analysis — Market.us, 2025
• Parachute Health digitizes DME — HME News