Building the Future of Physiotherapy: Kemtai’s Journey with Mike Telem

Ayush: Hi, Mike! How are you.

Mike: I’m good. Thanks, thanks for having me.

Ayush: Great. So I’ve been seeing that Kemtai has been making good waves. You know, and I’ve seen your product as well. Very cool stuff. So really would like to know more about your story, Mike, today. So tell us a bit more about where it all started your own background, and what inspired you to build Kemtai.

Mike: Sure. So I’ve been in the tech industry for more than 25 years. I started working with various companies large and small, in the Israeli High Tech Market, in 2009. I took my first stab at starting a startup, opening a startup with my best friend from high school back then. So I was 30 something had some experience behind me, and we opened up a company called Insightera, which did website personalization.

I spent 5 years running the company with Mickey raised money, got to the market, had quite a few customers and ended up being acquired by Marketo, an American company. I then spent that was in 2014. I then spent about 4 more years working at Marketo as VP Product Innovation and VP Product Marketing and that taught me a lot about scaling a company. Marketo was obviously a bigger company than ours and became even bigger.

Marketo itself was a few years later, acquired by Adobe for a few billion dollars. So you can understand the the size of the business. And I’m happy to say that Insightera my startup had some contribution to that was definitely an interesting business line for Marketo. I then

Mike Telem: was thinking about. Do I want to open another startup. Do I want to go through that roller coaster again? I was in very good relationships with my current co-founders, Naomi Keren and Mor Amitai. I knew them from the past. Always thought that they might be good folks to open a startup with and when we had an opportunity, about a year and a half after I left Marketo, kind of the stars aligned. They’ve always been into computer vision my startup in Insightera was all about personalization for websites and I always say, and we all had back pain.

So the combination of having back pain, sometimes doing physical therapy, seeing what can potentially be done with computer vision very quickly brought us to realize that we might be able to do what Kantai is actually doing today. And that is a computer vision based exercise and assessment platform that can analyze the human body and human motion and provide real time, feedback and corrective guidance in real time.

And that’s what we are have set off to do in Kemtai in 2019, so you can have a nice schedule. One start up in 2009, another in 2019, always right before or in the midst of a huge global crisis. The first time was the financial crisis in the US mortgage market, and second one was obviously of just a few months before COVID.

Ayush: Great, I think. But for a product like Kemtai I think the timing wouldn’t have been better, because I think that just quickly opened all of us to look for online options to do exercise, to do our routines. And you know, be more open to use technology in our homes.

Mike: Yeah, at a high level. COVID definitely reintroduce the market to telehealth and and virtual treatment and also for home fitness. That was dramatically accelerated at the time. Companies like Peloton, to be honest, you know, Ketai just started out literally a few months before, so we didn’t have a working product to launch while COVID was very impactful. But we were able to leverage it. We released some consumer versions and we were able to get people to train and exercise at home and just get some feedback and do some QA.

We started out, focused a bit more on fitness, because we knew it was going to take us a while until we get accurate enough for physical therapy and rehab and not exactly as planned, but not too far from it. After a couple of years we did start getting inbound requests from more physical therapy and rehab oriented organizations, mostly digital companies like recovery, one, for instance, and others that noticed our technology platform and its superiority, basically on anything else around and approached us and asked to integrate the Kemtai motion engine with our APIs into their platform.

Ayush: Right right. And Talk talk to us more about the superiority aspect that you just mentioned. So how is Kemtai different from all the other solutions that exist. And why? So? Let’s elaborate on that.

Mike: Yeah. So I’ll start with the why. The reason that a lot of the advantages that I’m gonna list in a minute, exist is for 2 main reasons. First of all, Kemtai is one of the only platforms that we’re aware of that uses its fully its own proprietary network models and computer vision models.

We don’t use any of the open source software. It is easier to start with the open source software, as you can imagine and in many use cases, other technologies. It’s the right thing to do in computer vision. Specifically, those libraries are not good enough. They’re not accurate enough. So you can get a demo, maybe going. But you there’s a very low ceiling. We decided to develop our own. And like I, said, Naomi and Mor, my two co-founders have more than 20 years of experience in computer vision. Some of the team, the core team members that joined us.

Alex and Mickey also have a lot of computer vision experience. So you could say, we already made some of the mistakes that others are making now and that initially created a much deeper and broader technology for us that enabled us to advance both faster and create a better
product, and by that some of the elements are for instance, we identify 111 points on the body, including the spine. Either no one, or almost no one or no one that I know of does that.

And that’s very important, not just for the accuracy of the feedback and the guidance but also to be able to cover a large range of exercises which is also important, so that you can cover a large, a wide range of conditions.

So with Kemtai, we already support more than 2,000 exercises and variations. Again, nobody even gets close to that. All of these exercises and variations with the computer vision, corrective guidance and the tracking of performance and adherence. So while Kemtai is focused on MSK Musculoskeletal conditions being a huge market. Customers also leverage Kemtai for other forms of rehab, like neurological or cardio, for medical fitness of the experience that can tie provides is much superior. We made a few additional decisions most of them more challenging, more difficult decisions that ended up providing or helping us provide a more robust product. So we can run on any device with a camera. You don’t need any sensors. You don’t need any wearables, and you don’t need any special camera or special iphone model or anything like that.

We’re also one of the only platforms that does provide a full API framework for others to incorporate contact in their product or a standalone version for healthcare providers that want a quick solution. So those are some of the things that really make us different. But it’s the bottom line is really the core technology that is dramatically better than anything else.

Ayush Jain: Great! So you know, building is one thing, and then there’s the go-to-market, which is a trouble spot for many health tech startups. So talk to us more about your go-to-market. You know, getting a first customer getting your first poc to getting your first paid customer. And you know, like building the brand once the technology was there.

Mike: Yeah. So as I mentioned, the first couple of customers literally came to us while we were still focused.

Ayush: That’s a good good situation.

Mike: In fitness. We noticed that there wasn’t yet enough maturity around the importance of proper form and guidance. I think that is changing, and I’m sure that Kemtai like technology, will be key for fitness. But that’s evolving a bit slower. So we started getting inbound requests from mainly digital platforms for Physio and Rehab and as that was happening and we were started to close deals. We started doubling down on that market and all of our first customers. And still today, a lot of our customers are digital platforms that integrate Kemtai into their offering companies like, like I mentioned, RecoveryOne and Clever Health and EXI therapeutics.

And then we started opening up to additional types of organizations, such as HSS, Sports Medicine Institute the Shiba Medical Center, which is a top 10 Global Medical Center HMOs and other types of let’s call it more traditional organizations that are also becoming digital or want to become digital and want to leverage these capabilities we are B2B, and we are only healthcare, or mostly healthcare or medical fitness. It is a tough market. It is a relatively slow and regulated market, and to some extent that’s totally understandable. You don’t want doctors and and and clinical teams to just rush to any new solution that they have. So it can be frustrating sometimes that things move slow more slowly than you’d expect or you’d want. But they do move, and we have a lot of interest and a lot of inbound requests on a daily basis.

And the one last thing I’ll mention which is fun, it’s more difficult. But again, maybe another one of those things that we will do that is more difficult to begin with, but will be worthwhile. We’re selling all over the world. We have customers today in 4 continents. It’s US like every company targets the US. But we also have customers in Europe and in Australia and in India. So and I’m actually hoping within within a few weeks we’ll have maybe a 1st customer in South America. So then we’ll have all. All major, all major geographical areas.

Ayush: Interesting. So that’s that’s very good. So when you say inbound so was that like a contribution out of your SEO effort, your content effort, or just being there at the right forums like what led to those inbounds, especially at that early stage.

Mike: So anybody that’s doing marketing in the past 10 years knows that it’s not that difficult, not that easy to identify what exactly drives inbound way way back in the day. And I still remember that Google still used to tell you what search terms were used and things like that today. You see that you have traffic from Google. You maybe see that it’s search traffic. But you don’t know if they were searching for Kemtai or were they searching for the best computer vision platform for physical therapy? So a lot of this traffic can be actually impacted from events that you go to right. You and I met at an event and a lot of our leads are coming from events, and some of them are clearly coming from the web, but they don’t always remember where they heard about you or how they got to you. And maybe they heard about you because of someone else at an event or some LinkedIn campaign.

So you need to use a mix of those channels. I think even a hundred years ago a very famous US CEO, of very traditional what was it? I don’t know. I remember if it was GM or something like that, he said I know that only 50% of my my marketing dollars work.

Ayush: 98%. I remember 98%.

Mike Telem: Yeah, no, no, no, the 50%. But I don’t know which 50%.

Ayush: Yeah, no, that’s what I was saying. I remember it is 98%. You don’t know. Even up to 98% don’t know like which 2% could you go? But yeah, even true for 50 or whatever percentage. But yeah. Great. No. That’s interesting. Because, you know what I wanted to ask was that definitely like, people would like to have inbound most health founders. But then, did you do anything around pushing that inbound, like what they need, recipes.

Mike: So we write content. Yeah, we do publish content, I think content on the website. But good content don’t use AI too much. You can definitely use it for your help. But you still need to spend time thinking. what am I gonna write about? And what am I trying to say here and then, you know, use AI for the polishing, webinars if you can get them. So you’re hosting me now, which is great. 2 days ago I hosted a few guests on a webinar. You have a webinar series by Kemtaiwith thought leaders. And we’re not talking about Kemtai. We’re talking about digital health so that’s another activity. Obviously, events. I I think it’s really fun and amusing to see how conferences and events and industry that was supposed to die 10 times already does not go away and it’s fun to see it, because we all personally like the human connection. So it’s nice to see that it’s not that easy to replace it.

I’ve seen many attempts of, you know virtual events, and whatever it never seems to work as well. I think it’s not only the human connection. I also think that when people go to events they’re more focused, they have less interruptions from emails and phone calls and whatever so they can actually spend more time looking at what’s out there. I have a couple of Israeli projects with large organizations in Israel, which is where we’re headquartered. That met us and got to know us at an event in Chicago, U.S.A.

Because when they were there, they had the time they had the attention span. They were open to looking at new things, and they stumbled upon us, and obviously the rest of the process is done here, but that’s so. I generated a lead from my home country when I was in the other side of the world, So events still work. And I think that’s the mix Events Linkedin, you know, emails right?

Ayush Jain: It comes like a holistic marketing nowadays. Right? So, Mike, in fact, on the similar lines, would you like to share some of your favorite user journeys or you know, customers that you onboarded. And you know interesting deals that you did, or especially what has been the impact that Kemtai has then created for those customers. Because what I understand is that most of your customers are themselves providing to the patients. And you are like a technology enablement for them. So those outcomes.

Mike: Yes, we provide technology for other providers, and and many of them are digital providers. So a few things that are very exciting that we’ve seen a lot of our digital providers were able to dramatically improve their engagement and their adherence rates. Many of them, for instance, used just regular passive videos. So there’s no guidance, there’s no feedback. And therefore the effectiveness of the therapy is low, and the adherence is low which further drive low effectiveness, and with Kemtai they were able to dramatically improve that. It also helped some of them close more deals, because having something like Kentai is a competitive edge. And today, even the bigger companies in the market of Gigital MSK and other markets, some of them theoretically have computer vision.

But it really doesn’t work well or doesn’t work at all. So the medium sized companies, for instance, that partner with us and use our technology are able to beat the bigger companies among other things based on them, having our technology. And that’s always fun to see. And some of our customers are signed very, very large contracts with insurance companies and other payers. And our technology pays a significant part in that. Obviously, it’s not the only thing we’ve also seen when we do work with the more traditional providers, and we’ve ran several large pilots and signed several deals in the UK. And in Italy and in Israel.

And now in the US again we’re seeing much better adherence and therefore much better results and even some academy organizations want to leverage Kemtai to make it easier for them to run experiments instead of bringing someone to a motion lab. They can use Kemtai to, you know, track range of motion, and how it’s improving, and how a certain type of treatment is helping or not helping, and that makes the the research just as accurate, but a lot more a lot cheaper and faster to to get done.

So I mean, those are just some the the good. The cool thing about the area that we operate in is that from the user perspective or the patient perspective and and the health problem, it is extremely similar. People have low back pain, or they do knee replacements in the US. And in the UK and in India. And it’s all the same, and the rehab is the same, and the requirements are the same. Obviously the business models are different. Who pays for what? And you need to figure that out when you enter each country, and sometimes there are localization efforts.

Should I translate to Italian or not? Should I? We already have FDA listing? Should we do the CE listing for Europe? So it does add headaches. But you can really become a global company, because the overall use case is quite similar.

Ayush: Right. Right. No, that’s the fantastic part I find. You know about the Kemtai model, as you explained, so it can primarily you know, help companies over the globe, and the business models could be different. But those could be different for your end customers. But for you it could be that technology piece that inserts, you know, for anybody. So switching is more on the tech side. So if you would like to share what’s new used cases, or apart from the physio aspect or the recovery aspect. Any other new used cases that Kemtai is working on, or any other exciting areas of work that you find, or any upcoming trends that you see in the market.

Mike: Yeah. So couple of things that we’re seeing and are happy to see one is Kemtai is now being used for what we call medical fitness, so either for weight, management, and obesity, or for GLP 1 users in the US. There are several companies that leverage Kemtai to help those people as they lose weight maintain their muscle mass, and keep exercising and moving. So that’s something we haven’t thought about originally and is becoming a new market for us.

Even more exciting, I think, on the like tech or theoretical level is that we’re starting to have organizations. One of them is the Shepherd Rehab center in Atlanta Top 10 rehab center in the US. That’s going to use Kemtai for neurological condition mainly related to Parkinson’s as well as the another rehab similar rehab center in Italy, called the Fonticione Mondino. That is now very close to also getting approval to run resources.

Ayush: So how does chemta fits into, say, a neurological disorder? Just

Mike: Yeah, new to me as well. And and and this is also exciting. I’m just learning a lot of new stuff. So a lot of the neurological conditions require 2 things. One is, as you can imagine, exercising in a specific way to strengthen some of the elements or joints or movements that were harmed by whatever your neurological condition was like a stroke, for instance.

But the other element that I’ve never thought about is some neurological conditions harm your
body perception. So, for instance, there’s a relatively famous condition called the Pisa condition, like the Pisa tower. So people are actually standing. They cannot stand straight, or they think that they’re standing straight. But they’re not so their body awareness is harmed by the neurological condition.

When they go to a rehab center. They do a lot of exercising in front of mirrors that actually have a line in them so that they can see what straight is, and it’ll help them. And the rehab center is what they told us are very helpful for them, but as soon as they go back home within a few weeks they go back, then deteriorate to the condition, to the status that they had before.

So using Something like Kemtai not only helps them kind of drive in the correct motion, but they see Kemtai, they see their body, their skeleton and Kemtai gives them that immediate feedback kind of like biofeedback, with visuals and sounds and audio cues that helps them realize if they are actually standing straight or doing a specific motion the right way.

Ayush: Hmm. Interesting.

Mike: Those are some of the areas in which it seems that contact can be very helpful. And it’s very exciting cause MSK is obviously huge, but helping with neurological conditions is also kind of like the next level, at least in terms of complexity, not something we expected to be able to do, but certainly something we’re very happy to be able to help with.

Ayush: Right. Right. So, and yeah, that’s very super exciting to know. And you know, to see like how things you know, kind of evolve from one use to another, and they overlap, which brings me to another. You know. I’d say area or facet of growth and opportunities is, you know, with the new technology. So like, how does like is, is there AI from the computer vision aspect, of course. But is there a more of that generative AI piece to Kemtai in any form? And if yes, then how? And also even the new other technology trends that are there in the future, let’s say, virtual reality augmented reality. So do all of these become a part of your product roadmap as well.

Mike: So generative AI would probably become a part, I think, especially around defining protocols. Using those types of technologies to have a virtual conversation with the patient and based on their answers. Realizing what is the best fitting protocol for treatment looks like a no-brainer. Another element is machine learning to better analyze actual performance and adherence results and to be able to identify what are actually the most effective exercises for a specific condition for a specific segment of the population. I have to say that with regards to VR and AR, I am not a big fan. I think that as long as they do require various types of hardware it will always be a very limited use case. I might be wrong. But I’ve thought that 10 years ago, and 5 years ago, and at least now, even now, you see that there are some limits, whether it’s wearing goggles, or whatever glasses, or whatever it might be.

And I think that at least in our area you know the ability to see some virtual world and that that helps you go through some of the movements is a nice idea. I just don’t. I’m I’m just not sure that it’s such a huge advantage of versus being in the real world and having something. Analyze your motion and telling you what you should do. So I, personally don’t see that as a strong direction at the moment for therapy and rehab. But I might be wrong.

Ayush: Right. Right. Yeah. And and that’s the best part, like about the future, you never know. So so you know, you are always learning and growing your thought processes. So yeah. Mike, so that brings us to the end of the podcast one last question, would be, where do you see Kemtai? You know. What’s your vision? For year 2024 and year 2027.

Mike: So really, our vision and goal is to make Kemtai the gold standard of computer vision for health and wellness, and to see millions of people use Kemtai directly or indirectly, mostly indirectly VR customers and, more importantly, have them benefit from Kemtai. We want to see millions of people use Kemtai, which is a more scalable and more accessible way to consume physical therapy together with physical PTs, or in some cases, maybe the less severe cases just by choosing a protocol to run at home. And it is fun, you know. My first startup was all about marketing technology. So I was helping someone sell something to you wasn’t exactly changing the world. It was a great challenge. It was difficult, it was satisfying. I’m happy, I did it

Now. It’s a lot more than succeeding financially like, if Kemtai continues to grow, we can really help millions of people, because musculoskeletal conditions are are a huge problem. It’s the biggest healthcare spend in the US. And in Europe more than diabetes, more than cancer, because people suffer from it, but they don’t die from it and more than half of all adults suffer from it, and even you and me. I don’t know if you have a backache right now, but we’re sitting on our computers all day if we were to do 10 min, 10 min of stretching here and there. So I think it has huge potential to really make people healthier and feel better and have last, less pain. And and I’m looking forward to seek and tie everywhere in various use cases inside different products that will leverage our technology.

Ayush: Right. Right. And that’s that’s what I envision about Kemtai like. You know, one is the current usage, which is more driven by B2B. But you know, as technology evolves if we can bring it to as you know, natural to just in the web browser. If you could just launch a session just like Zoom, and you know, maybe be able to do the session. You know, while the processing could be happening on the cloud. So that kind of convenience which could then impact. Like, you know, each and every user just being able to use it throughout the world.

Mike: Yeah. Definitely.

Ayush: Yes, so wish you all the best, Mike. This was a great conversation learning about Kemtai, and also even learning lessons. You know, about building health product ground up and achieving the different goals, both on the business as well as changing lives. Thank you so much. Thank you for your time.

Mike: Thanks a lot, and thanks for having me.

Mike Telem is a seasoned tech entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience. He founded Kemtai in 2019, a computer vision-based exercise and assessment platform. The company aims to provide real-time feedback and corrective guidance for users to improve their physical health.

We’ve discussed:

✅ How Kemtai has helped customers improve engagement, adherence rates, and treatment outcomes.
✅ How company is expanding into new areas, such as neurological conditions and medical fitness.
✅ Kemtai’s vision is to become the gold standard for computer vision in health and wellness, benefiting millions of people worldwide.
✅ Future plans include leveraging generative AI for personalized protocols and exploring potential applications in virtual reality and augmented reality and much more.