Shawn Reese

Shawn Reese is a Founder-in-Residence at Roadrunner Venture Studios. He is exploring opportunities at the intersection of robotics, manufacturing, and AI. In addition to his role at Roadrunner, Shawn is the founder and owner of Practical Bionics, which is a purpose-built shop for innovating soft bionics and advanced robotic manufacturing technology.

From 2018 to 2022, Shawn was a research scientist at Meta’s Reality Labs Research division where he worked on cutting edge human-computer interfacing technology, including virtual reality gloves and wrist based neural interfaces.

Prior to Meta, Shawn co-founded Bend Labs, which was a hardware startup focused on innovating electroactive elastomer sensors for measuring stretch, bending, and pressure in wearables, medical devices and virtual reality gloves. As CEO of Bend Labs Shawn helped raise multiple rounds of financing, drove significant revenue, led technical innovation and negotiated a licensing deal with a Fortune 100 tech company. Bend Labs was eventually acquired by Nitto Denko.

Prior to Bend Labs, Shawn was the first hire for the startup CoNextions Medical where he worked closely with an orthopedic surgeon to innovate a novel repair system for flexor tendons in the fingers. This technology has been used in hundreds of patients. As part of development, Shawn led a successful in-vivo animal study and won a Phase I SBIR grant.

Shawn received his PhD in biomedical engineering with an emphasis in computational and experimental biomechanics at the University of Utah and holds degrees in both Physics and Math/Bio at Western Washington University.