Courtesy of Vault Kinetics Media Team

For most students, a class project gets submitted and forgotten after finals week. Five Yale students, however, transformed one final project into a fit-tech startup, Vault Kinetics. 

Joshua Gao ’26 took “Introduction to Engineering, Innovation, and Design,” or ENAS 118, in his first semester at Yale and worked with a team of other Yale students to build out a new business idea. Yet, he kept working on the class project past the final deadline and turned it into a startup. With a team of Yale students, he developed a dot drill, a performance pad designed to collect real-time movement and performance metrics for athletes.

“We give them the support, and teach them things that are relevant, but, you know, we just have really great students,” ENAS 118 professor Lawrence Wilen told the News. “That’s what makes these projects so successful.”

With short modules throughout the semester on each of the five engineering disciplines at Yale, the course culminates in a final engineering group project. Historically, ENAS 118 students have been assigned to work with clients for their final project. 

When Gao was taking the class, Abby Quinn, Yale Athletics’ director of sports performance and student-athlete innovation, showcased the dot drill. She wanted it to measure both accuracy and quantity of reps on the mat.

So Gao started working on the project along with other students in the class. But for him, that work did not stop at the end of the finals period — it evolved into Vault Kinetics, a startup focused on developing intelligent flooring with advanced pressure sensors that aims to change how athletes train. 

Gao met his teammates — Eunice Han ’26, Eric Wang ’25, Justin Pan ’27 and Matthew Riley ’27 — in unexpected ways. Not all of them actually took ENAS 118 with Gao, and none had a background in sports science or professional athletics. Instead, they are united by their love for entrepreneurship and involvement in the Christian community at Yale — which is how they originally met. 

The team spent this summer in New Haven, working out of what they call the “Vault House,” a three-story house that four of the members resided in. Living in the same house not only increased the team’s productivity but also strengthened their friendships. 

The other benefit of living in New Haven was its proximity to the Center for Engineering and Innovative Design, the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale and the School of Engineering and Applied Science. 

ENAS 118 is part of the engineering school, and instruction happens in CEID. Even after the course ended, the team benefited from mentorship and help from the engineering school. They also have remained in close contact with Quinn and Yale Athletics, who let them test their product on football, basketball and baseball players over the summer. 

The CEID provided the machinery to engineer their designs, and Tsai CITY alongside Yale Ventures and two outside investors helped fund Vault Kinetics and cover the costs of running the business and living in New Haven.

Their main product that came out of the summer’s work is the dot drill, a performance pad designed to collect real-time movement and performance metrics for athletes. The team also develops the algorithms analyzing the signals from the pad and providing athletes with insights through the app. 

The team says that while building the product they had to address three challenges. 

The first one was creating the links between the physical hardware mat and the software that provides analytic insights. Over time, the sensors in these types of mats naturally wear down, the signals become noisier and it becomes harder to distinguish sensor actuations.

Wang, a lead software developer, said that a lot of work was done on “finding out some sort of mathematical relationship between how the sensors [wear out] over time and the actual output.”

Second, they had to package the insights and data from the mat in a digestible format.

Han remembers Gao telling her that “not everyone is a data scientist, but they do want to feel like they’re scientists.” 

The tough part, Han said, is that depending on who you are — a gym coach, physical therapist or anything in between — your needs are different. 

“Mak[ing] sure that those needs were met and also that the information was clear, easy to understand and beautiful” were the primary focuses for the team, according to Han.

The final challenge, which Gao cited as the biggest learning opportunity, was running the team.

“How do you get eight people, who are all Yalies and like high achieving, [to] row the same boat in the same direction,” Gao said. However, these situations have also been Gao’s area of “most learning.”

Beyond Yale Athletics, Vault Kinetics has worked on a National Science Foundation project with Princeton and struck up deals with the University of Kansas Athletics’ sports science lab and an undisclosed major sports technology distributor.

The company’s main customers are boutique independent gyms and athletic programs.

All of the team members are full-time students, and balancing a packed Yale course schedule with running a startup was not easy, the team said. However, when asked if any of them were considering taking time off school to work on the startup full-time, they all responded no.

“I think for us all school and involvement in [the] Christian community on campus is sort of the utmost priority,” Wang said. 

The team is unsure where this venture will take them. But, for now, they are going to continue building out Vault Kinetics at the place where it all started – Yale.

Vault Kinetics’ new product, Genesis, is coming soon, according to the company’s website.