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 slightest unusual landing pattern can flag an elevated risk of ACL or MCL tears, which represent 50% of all knee injuries in the U.S. That’s because the way you stand, walk, and jump can be quantified and used to predict a wide range of health risks, including 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 mats with embedded sensors placed on the floor. Standing on a plate, any movement like reaching forward shifts your weight to your toes, causing variations in force profiles that can be correlated with disease.

Vault Kinetics is building a cheaper and lighter version of this force plate technology called the Force Platform. Its stationary pad is embedded with an array of capacitive sensors that generate a full pressure map for jump testing, gait analysis, balance testing, sit-to-stand assessment, and broader biomechanical evaluation.

By moving this technology out of the research lab and into gyms and clinics, Vault Kinetics seeks to give strength and conditioning coaches, clinicians, and college athletic departments, not just scientists, direct access to reports that flag early signs of injury risk.

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 Vault Force Platform. Sign up here to be first in line.

While studying mechanical engineering at Yale, CEO Joshua Gao worked on quantum-tunneling composite flooring, a pressure-sensitive surface that turns the ground into a measurement instrument. He began applying that sensing technology to human performance, which led to Vault Kinetics’ foundational patent, co-filed with a Yale engineering professor.

After attending the National Strength and Conditioning Conference in July of 2024 through Yale and with the Dean of Engineering, the founders wewe 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. It's a harder wedge to own but a more defensible one. If Vault delivers data quality that coaches, researchers, and eventually clinicians trust, it can transition to serving the wider consumer category. 

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.