STRYK was invented by our founding engineer Brent Verdialez.

Verdialez was injured during a training exercise enlisted in the U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets). He sought a way to keep training despite his injury and used his electronics background to build the RXT-1.

Verdialez started boxing in his pre-teens then trained Wing Chun and Sanda until he enlisted in the Army.

He was selected for the Army Special Forces, a.k.a. the Green Berets, then assigned to 1st SF Group then promoted to Sergeant First Class.

He continued training between deployments until an injury derailed his martial arts journey. But Verdialez was resilient and sought a way to train despite the injury.

Verdialez "couldn't even turn a doorknob, let alone punch something," he told the Army Times. But he persisted.

While recovering at home, Verdialez coupled his Special Forces engineering background and his childhood experience training with wooden sparring dummies to develop what would eventually become the STRYK RXT-1.

He built a workstation and began sketching, wiring, and developing the prototype. Verdialez studied computer programming when he wasn't tinkering in his garage on it.

He experimented with foam arms and other attachments before he built the prototype of the RXT-1, a robotic sparring partner and boxing robot.

He kept testing it, the angles, the speed, patterns, and combinations.

Before long, he introduced motors to the prototype to mimic the speed of a human punch. The rest is history.