Inside the glass-ensconced Wandercraft storefront on Park Avenue South, Caroline Laubach recently rose from her wheelchair and walked.
“Every time I get up I remember how tall I really am,” Laubach, a 22-year-old from Pennsylvania, told NYNext.
At age 18, Laubach went into end-stage heart failure. For two weeks, she lingered on life support while doctors scrambled to find a donor. She ultimately had a successful heart transplant, but not before a spinal stroke left her paralyzed from the waist down.
She thought she would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, then she met Wandercraft’s Atalante. During a therapy session in November 2024, she strapped on the exoskeleton for the first time. It was life-changing.
“To look at somebody from eye-level and have a connection with them in that way,” she said. “It’s a different dynamic.”
Founded in 2012, the French robotics and AI company Wandercraft launched its first model of Atalante in 2019. The device received FDA clearance for stroke rehabilitation two years later.
In December 2023, Wandercraft opened a headquarters and showroom in New York. It’s betting that its exoskeletons can help redefine mobility for people with spinal cord injuries, strokes and other conditions affecting gait and balance.
“We are not just a technology [confined to] cool video demonstrations in the lab,” Matthieu Masselin, CEO and co-founder of Wandercraft, told NYNext. “We are working with real people, real patients.”
Unlike other exoskeletons that require crutches, both Atalante and Wandercraft’s newer model, Eve, are fully self-balancing. The former is designed specifically for physical therapy and requires the assistance of a clinician. The latter, now in clinical trials at the Bronx VA and Kessler Rehabilitation Center in New Jersey, can be fully controlled by the user and is built for personal use in home and real-world environments.
Wandercraft’s exoskeletons are powered by multiple motors — two at the ankles, one at each knee and several at the hips — plus a suite of sensors that constantly track weight distribution. As the user shifts or moves, the system processes inputs in real time to maintain balance and posture.
From weight and height to balance and stride, every patient moves differently.
To ensure safety, Wandercraft has spent more than a decade refining its control algorithms and AI systems with collaborators like Nvidia and AWS. It’s tested its hardware with more than 2,000 patients in hospitals and rehab centers.
One prominent patient is French paraplegic tennis player Kevin Piette, who donned a Wandercraft exoskeleton to carry the Olympic torch towards Paris ahead of the 2024 Games.
“Emotionally, psychologically, physiologically … [we’re seeing] the benefits on so many aspects of [the patients’] lives,” Masselin said.
Wandercraft devices are currently used in more than 100 institutions across Europe and America, and access is expanding.
The company recently received Medicare coding for Atalante, meaning qualifying patients will be reimbursed. When Eve hits the market,potentially as soon as next year, it will be eligible for reimbursement up to $93,000.
To help scale, Wandercraft partnered with the Renault Group in June to streamline manufacturing and reduce costs. As part of the partnership, Wandercraft is also developing a new line of humanoid robots that can slot into the manufacturing process.
To Masselin, who relocated from Paris three years ago to lead US expansion, the future of the technology lies in its adaptation to broader environments — stairs, outdoor terrain, even beaches — and in building devices that respond to how people actually live.
This story is part of NYNext, an indispensable insider insight into the innovations, moonshots and political chess moves that matter most to NYC’s power players (and those who aspire to be).
Laubach, for her part, hopes to be among the first to take Eve home once FDA clearance is granted.
“I hope we see a lot more exoskeletons out on the street,” she told NYNext, “for people like me — and people very different from me.”
Send NYNext a tip: nynextlydia@nypost.com
