Finalist badge in hand, Ashkan Joshghani headed to the Olympic Museum in Lausanne last month to pitch his revolutionary idea for a sports glove at the Sports Innovation Challenge. Now back at the Wintercircus Startup Campus, the Exoligamentz founder is fine-tuning what he confidently calls “one of the most sophisticated gloves ever developed.”

“I’ll be the first to admit I’m the odd one out here,” says Ashkan Joshghani as we sit down to talk. “I’m concocting a glove at the Wintercircus Startup Campus – surrounded by startups building software and AI.” But as our conversation unfolds, it quickly becomes clear that standing out is nothing new for Ashkan. It’s practically his default setting.

Ashkan’s story starts long before Exoligamentz. In the 1990s, his mother fled Iran as a political refugee, seeking safety in Belgium, where the family had to rebuild their lives from the ground up while facing their share of racism. But Ashkan refused to be defined by circumstance. He pursued veterinary medicine at Ghent University, graduating in 2018. Along the way, he also became the first student entrepreneur to secure funding from the university’s Industrial Research Fund ... for a glove designed for Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioners. Wait, what? Yep. We had questions, too.

Ashkan laughs. “Okay, fair enough – it was a pretty unusual idea. Professor Lieva Van Langenhove thought so too when I emailed her out of the blue ten years ago.” Given her textile materials and production expertise, the professor was definitely a natural fit for the idea. Still, one question loomed large: why was a bachelor’s student in veterinary medicine pitching a high-tech sports glove?

Like with most good ideas, the answer is surprisingly simple. In 2013, Ashkan took up Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a martial art that’s been steadily growing in popularity – especially since Keanu Reeves started flipping bad guys with it in the John Wick movies. From day one, he noticed fellow practitioners taping their hands, but he ignored their advice to do the same. “Human nature, I guess,” he shrugs. “You only take a problem seriously once it affects you.”

Six months later, the inevitable happened: Ashkan injured the collateral ligaments in his middle fingers. “And that was a real wake-up call,” he says. “Because even as a veterinary student, I knew repeated injuries like that could cause long-term damage. Your hands lose functionality over time, and I needed mine to be able to operate. Literally.”

To Ashkan, however, all that taping seemed rather cumbersome. It took time to wrap the fingers properly, and the tape would eventually loosen with sweat. “And if it works so well,” he wondered, “why do so many athletes still end up with enlarged finger joints so early in life?” That question sparked the idea: what if there were a glove you could easily slip on – a kind of soft exoskeleton? Flexible enough to move freely during sport, yet strong enough to protect the fingers where tape clearly fell short.

That idea, mind you, proved more complex than the gluten-free cakes and craft beers his fellow student entrepreneurs were working on. But Ashkan didn’t back down. With support from Prof. Van Langenhove and others at Ghent University, he not only secured a patent for his concept but also became the first student to have an Industrial Research Fund project approved, taking student entrepreneurship into uncharted, research-driven territory.

Long story short: since 2014, Ashkan has been obsessing over creating the perfect sports glove – through plenty of trial and error. But if there’s one thing you have to hand him, it’s his resilience. From the hurdles of student entrepreneurship to the chaos of Brexit and COVID-19, the road he’s traveled with Exoligamentz has been anything but smooth. “I won’t tell you how many prototypes we’ve gone through,” he grins. “But I always believed I’d crack the code eventually. And you know what also helped? I wasn’t solving someone else’s problem – I was solving my problem.”

Fueled by that same mindset, Ashkan – who now also runs his own jiu-jitsu club in Ghent – found his way to the Wintercircus Startup Campus. Six months ago, he launched the first beta version of the XH1: “a second-skin glove offering superior finger reinforcement and seamlessly integrating with the hand’s anatomy,” as the Exoligamentz website puts it. Packed with cutting-edge design and textile tech, the XH1 is already “one of the most sophisticated gloves on the planet,” according to the entrepreneur. What it lacked, until now, was AI. But that’s about to change.

“For the beta version, getting the exact measurements of each customer’s hands was important to me,” Ashkan explains. “So I went to their sports clubs and measured them myself. No two hands are the same, and if this glove is going to feel like a second skin, it has to strike the perfect balance - protective, yet agile.”

Of course, Ashkan knows better than anyone that his - pun intended - hands-on approach isn’t scalable. That’s why he’s now training an AI model that will allow future customers to order the perfect glove size using a single photo of their hands. “That’s exactly why Wintercircus is the ideal place for me right now,” he says. “But honestly, even beyond the ‘tech support,’ it’s an incredibly inspiring and supportive environment. Turns out, the startup grind looks pretty similar whether you’re designing gloves or writing code.”

And who knows, maybe he’ll even get the other Startup Campus residents hooked on Brazilian jiu-jitsu. “There’s much interest,” Ashkan says, springing up enthusiastically. “Because once you step onto the tatami, all external privileges disappear. In Brazilian jiu-jitsu, progress depends solely on your mind, body, and commitment. There are no shortcuts – it’s strictly pay-per-sweat. Every struggle, every setback, teaches you something. You rely only on yourself, and that’s where real resilience, humility, and respect are forged. Qualities that stick with you far beyond the dojo, and that every entrepreneur stands to gain from.”