A robot that walks beside you, not for you
Most knee braces are dumb on purpose. They hold a joint in place and ask nothing of it. Amaury Ciurana looked at that arrangement and decided it was a waste of good engineering. His company, REEV, builds an orthosis that does the opposite of holding still - it senses how you move, then adds power exactly where your stride goes weak. The device is called DREEVEN, it weighs about eleven pounds, and REEV describes it as the first AI-powered robotic knee orthosis aimed at people regaining independent everyday mobility beyond the clinic.
Ciurana is the co-founder and CEO. He is French, trained as an aerospace engineer, and now runs the company out of Boston with a second home base in Toulouse. The two-city setup is not an accident of fundraising. It is the shape of the idea itself: European deep-tech engineering pointed at the American medical-device market.
The product comes in two parts, and the order matters. First REEV SENSE, a set of wearable sensors that reads a person's gait and turns it into data - a personal walking signature. Then DREEVEN, the powered orthosis that uses that signature to decide how much help to give, step by step, in real time. Ultra-precision hydraulic actuation does the lifting. The brace can assist a user weighing up to roughly 290 pounds. The point is not raw strength. The point is that the assistance is personalized, and that it adapts as the person changes.
A million-euro head start
Before there was a company, there was a curriculum. Ciurana studied aerospace engineering at ISAE-SUPAERO, then stacked entrepreneurship training on top of it: a year at École Polytechnique, the X-HEC Entrepreneurs master's at HEC Paris, and a stint at UC Berkeley's Learn2Launch program. Somewhere in that stretch he won the Lopez-Loreta Prize for Academic Excellence - a one-million-euro award - for a course of study dedicated to entrepreneurship in medical exoskeletons.
Think about that sequence. He won a seven-figure prize for proposing to build the thing, and then he went and built it. The prize money is a luxury most founders never get. The conviction it signals is rarer still.
The co-founder from orbit
A CEO is only as good as the engineer he can convince to leave a stable job. Ciurana's is Robin Temporelli, REEV's CTO, a mechatronics engineer with a PhD from the University of Sherbrooke and a resume that runs through Safran and Airbus Defence and Space. Temporelli contributed to the ExoMars Rover - hardware built to move reliably on another planet, where no one can come fix it. That is roughly the standard of reliability you want when the machine is strapped to a person's leg.
The aerospace lineage is the whole personality of the company. Precision hydraulics, real-time sensing, fault tolerance - these are flight-grade habits, redirected toward a problem that lives at walking pace.
Wearable sensors that capture a patient's gait and build a personal walking signature. The diagnosis half of the system.
A motorized knee orthosis using ultra-precision hydraulic actuation to adapt assistance in real time. The treatment half.
Newfund Heka, Polytechnique Ventures and Irdi Capital led the 2025 round, with Techstars, angels and healthcare operators alongside.
Clinical validation work with MIT and a partnership with Thuasne USA, the orthotics maker. FDA clearance is the next milestone.
What goes into one step
A rough sketch of where REEV's engineering attention lands. Proportions are illustrative, drawn from how the company describes its own priorities.
From classroom to clearance
- 2016–2020Aerospace engineering at ISAE-SUPAERO, with entrepreneurship detours through Polytechnique, HEC Paris and UC Berkeley.
- 2020Finishes the X-HEC Entrepreneurs master's. The exoskeleton thesis that won a million euros becomes a business plan.
- 2021Co-founds REEV in Toulouse with CTO Robin Temporelli.
- 2023REEV joins Techstars. Ciurana moves to the US to open the company's American front.
- 2024Introduces REEV SENSE, the gait-analysis layer of the system.
- 2025Closes a $9.2M round to push DREEVEN through clinical and industrial development and toward FDA clearance.
Small things worth knowing
REEV's own LinkedIn tagline reads "building the future of walking assistance," with a mechanical-leg emoji where a period should be. It is the rare corporate one-liner that tells you exactly what the company does and how seriously it takes itself - which is very, and also not at all.
The company values it lists are a tidy six: Social Impact, Ambition, Autonomy, Excellence, Humility, Persistence. Autonomy lands differently when your product is, literally, about giving people their autonomy back.
And the team has a third pillar most hardware startups skip: a clinical lead, Lou Awad, an associate professor at Boston University with appointments at Harvard and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Engineering on one side of the Atlantic, fundraising and clinical credibility on the other.