Kunal Gandhi’s own injuries and those inflicted on his family members have tasked him to find a better way to deal with and treat pain. It’s ultimately what led him to launch EZPT, a virtual clinic that vies to provide a tailored exercise program by using computer vision motion analysis. Whether someone is recovering from injury or performing athletics at the highest level, Gandhi is hopeful EZPT can match users with the specialist that will meet them where they’re at. Since its founding in 2019, EZPT has received numerous startup awards locally and quietly raised a preseed round last fall.
I grew up in a house where my [paternal] grandfather was a stroke patient. When I turned 14, we put him in a nursing home. Days later, my mother had a stroke and lost her ability to walk in her 40s.
At 16, I started my personal training business where I would coach friends at my high school. By 18, I was a certified personal trainer and coached people online through Instagram across seven countries.
Two weeks before my freshmen year at the University of Pittsburgh, I herniated a disc in my back and had unbearable nerve pain that would prevent me from sitting in chairs or standing for extended periods. I continued to push through this pain and saw 15 physical therapists to try to heal.
I became the Master Personal Trainer for the University of Pittsburgh and coached students with the philosophy of injury prevention. I learned with virtual training that there wasn’t a way for clients to receive feedback when I was not around. There were no exercise programs focused on people with preexisting chronic pain. To solve this problem, we created EZPT, a motion-tracking technology that could provide real-time feedback and prevent injuries before they happened.
After a year of building, the Covid-19 pandemic allowed us to focus on growth. My co-founders Jai Chawla (CTO) and Nik Gandhi (chief marketing officer) and I were trapped in quarantine with a mission to prevent injuries around the world. We won prizes at local startup competitions — Randall Family Big Idea Competition and Duquesne New Venture Challenge — and were the first Pitt startup to win prizes at the world’s largest startup competition, Rice Business Plan Competition.
During this time, I moved out to San Francisco, was named the Young Entrepreneur of the Year by NBA Legend Magic Johnson and the NFL Players Association. EZPT received an opportunity to collaborate with world-renowned physician, Dr. Arnold Milstein, the founder of Stanford Medicine’s Clinical Excellence Research Center, with whom we are collaborating on research to lower per-capita spending on musculoskeletal-related conditions.
We were fortunate to be one of the first investments from the Big Idea Advantage Fund at Pitt. After traveling the country, I returned home to New Jersey with five team members to continue to build the app. Jai led the initiative on the app launch, and Nik reached hundreds of thousands of people in over 60+ countries from viral TikTok videos.
We closed our preseed round in October led by investor and billionaire Chris Klaus and have built an incredible team of 15 people from experts with 35+ years in health care to young people who can make TikTok videos go viral. With tremendous support from the City of Pittsburgh, I knew this was the right city to build our company.
In the coming years, we believe our technology will be applied across multiple silos in health care. We plan to build the world’s first virtual hospital.
ABOUT KUNAL GANDHI
Title: Co-founder & CEO, EZPT
Age: 23
Year company founded: 2019
What is your dream job? “Currently living it.”
