Heard of Cannes Lions? Arek is in Nice today, and we’re starting to understand why the tech crowd is jumping to host events on the French Riviera… for strictly business reasons, you may or may not catch us there next year.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy today’s article on Vault Kinetics. As two health enthusiasts, we love getting our hands on as much health data as possible. Sports injuries suck, and Vault is aiming to keep athletes in the know!

Arek and Ethan 🦄

The way you stand, walk, and jump can be quantified and used to predict a wide range of health factors, including the risk of an ACL tear and even the progression of Alzheimer’s. To measure this data, academic researchers in fields such as sports medicine, orthopedics, and neurology use floor plates, which are flat devices with embedded sensors placed on the floor. When standing on a plate, any movement creates variations in force profiles that can be correlated with disease. 

Going from capturing this data to analyzing it and interpreting the results, however, involves several barriers to entry, such as equipment costs, access, and expertise, which prevent the average consumer from getting these insights. Vault Kinetics is solving this by building an integrated platform consisting of a cheaper, lighter, and more optimal version of the plate technology and bundling it with a software platform that uses AI to analyze and interpret the data. 

Its platform also integrates wearables and nutritional information to provide the user with an even richer understanding of their health.

Check it out: vaultkinetics.com

Vault Kinetics currently sells hardware units and analysis software to athletic and performance environments, with an initial focus on elite sports, including basketball. Its current entry point is vertical jump testing that analyzes crucial performance and recovery metrics, including an athlete’s squat jump, countermovement jump, and reactive strength index. The company is expanding the hardware to support other movement assessments.

Vault Kinetics is opening its waitlist for early access to Rev 2, its new hardware unit. Sign up here to be first in line.

While studying mechanical engineering at Yale, CEO Joshua Gao researched how to use Carbon black to design sensors, leading him and his professor to pioneer a new method of detecting force reliably and more precisely over time using capacitance, which was then patented.

Joshua and Paul met during their first year at Yale. After attending the National Strength and Conditioning Conference in July of 2024 through Yale and with the Dean of Engineering, the founders were convinced that the performance-tech category hadn't meaningfully innovated in years. They believed there was an opening for a product that could deliver lab-quality force plate data analytics in a more consumer friendly format. Early adoption by Yale Athletics helped demonstrate that the technology could be commercialized, leading to the development of Vault’s first product, Vault One.

Vault Kinetics starts from a conviction that both healthcare and consumer wellness are structurally broken. Echoing our previous interview with Superpower's cofounder Max Marchione, COO Paul Douglass was a competitive powerlifter and realized that modern healthcare was designed to react, treating injury only after it appears, while consumer wellness claims to catch problems earlier but innovates mostly at the surface. 

WHOOP, Oura, and Fitbit compete on algorithms and polish layered over what are, underneath, the same commodity sensors capturing the same data. Meanwhile, the people with the most to gain from real measurement, including elite athletes and longevity-focused figures like Bryan Johnson, pay for teams of scientists and rely on the gold standard, the force plate, which captures ground-reaction forces with a fidelity that no on-wrist wearable approaches. Current consumer wearables capture physiological data such as heart rate, VO2 max, and distance traveled, while biomechanical data related to force plates stays locked inside labs because the sensors are expensive and scarce, and the analysis requires research expertise. 

Vault is trying to own the sensor layer itself, inventing a cheaper way to collect force-plate-grade data. Current force plates are tri-axial, meaning they can sense movement of the plate in all three directions, but they typically only use up to four individual force sensors. In contrast, Vault’s flagship hardware, the Force Platform, uses a grid of 64 individual force sensors to turn the floor into a heat map of pressure, providing insights even the top force plates are blind to, including an outline of your foot, subtle shifting of weight onto your toes, pronation, and supination. Additionally, current force plates are rigid, whereas the Force Platform is made of a flexible material, allowing the data measurements to be done in any environment.

Cheap, ubiquitous force-plate data would open two doors at once. For consumers, it means access to high-caliber biomechanical data that enriches their health overview, allowing them to track body performance, stability, and injury more clearly. For science, it enables large sample sizes in clinical studies by expanding access to data collection methods.

If Vault Kinetics succeeds in making lab-grade measurements as common as the wearables that came before it, it will lay the foundation for a new era of preventative health, one where the tools once reserved for the world's elite become the baseline for everyone.