Aly Orady just wanted to work out in peace, with access to his favourite exercise equipment. “I was going to the gym every single day at 5 a.m., 6 a.m.,” he recalled. “I’m staring at this giant machine that I really like to use called a cable crossover. If you really learn how to use it, you can do your whole work out there. I wished I could just get this machine into my apartment, and I realized that if I made it run on electricity instead of big metal plates and gravity, I could shrink it down.”
That was the moment when Orady ’98 – a McMaster Electrical and Computer Engineering alumnus who will receive an honorary degree from his alma mater on June 17, 2025 – had the idea for Tonal, the in-home, smart-gym company he founded in 2015. Yet, the first steps on the path to that moment of inspiration occurred decades before.
Orady and his twin sister Mona, also a McMaster graduate, were born in the McMaster University Medical Centre, and it wasn’t long before Aly began displaying the interests and aptitudes of a future engineer. His mother Soraya Orady, who, like her late husband Elsayed, earned two graduate degrees from the McMaster Faculty of Engineering, said of her son, “When he was two years old, any toy, he would take it apart and put it back together.”
When young Orady discovered computers, his path was all but set. “Probably the most fateful moment was when my dad bought an IBM PC,” he said. Orady wanted to play games, but his father had other ideas. “He hands me this programming manual for a language called GW BASIC… I started programming when I was six or seven.” A few years later, Orady put his skills to work in the computer business his parents started. As his mother said, “He would help me assemble the computers and test them and install the software.”
“I think, in some ways, entrepreneurship is just in my blood. The idea that I was going to start a company was a question of when and not if.”
Despite having relocated from Hamilton to Ann Arbor, Michigan before they were high-school age, the Orady twins came back to Mac for their undergraduate studies. In Orady’s words, “I fell in love with McMaster.” One of the defining aspects of his student experience was the collaborative character of Mac Eng. “When there was a break between classes, me and my friends would either end up at the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] room or in the basement of Thode Library. In fact, the most effective way to study for any exams was just to go to Thode because you were guaranteed to learn everything you needed just by listening to what everyone else was discussing.”
After graduating at 19, Orady went to Silicon Valley for a job as a hardware engineer at Hewlett-Packard’s Computer Systems Laboratory. At the same time, he enrolled in the Master of Science in Electrical Engineering program at Stanford University. It was an intense experience that helped launch Orady towards a career as a tech entrepreneur. “When I started working for Hewlett-Packard, I knew I would learn a lot,” he said. “I’m 19 years old and I’m in a lab with probably $100 million of equipment. How many 19-year-olds get to experience that?”
The ink was barely dry on Orady’s Stanford degree when he left HP and launched his first company. It was a milestone the entire Orady family had been expecting for a long time. Soraya Orady said of her son, “When he was young, he would say, ‘Mom, I’m going to have my own business.’” To Orady, he was following in his parents’ entrepreneurial footsteps, saying, “I think, in some ways, entrepreneurship is just in my blood. The idea that I was going to start a company was a question of when and not if.”
The company Orady started was Pano Logic, an enterprise infrastructure venture that made technology for data centres. When Samsung later purchased Pano Logic, the deal effectively set Orady on the path to founding Tonal, largely because the purchase committed him to providing two years of consulting that involved extensive travel to Korea. The trans-Pacific commute took a toll. “My health was a disaster,” he admitted. As a result, he said, “I spent nine months learning about nutrition and learning about fitness. In nine months, I got healthy.” This was when he developed the habit of early morning trips to the gym and had the inspiration to invent a flexible, at-home work-out platform based on resistance provided by electric motors.
“I was so excited about this, I went home and I started researching,” Orady said. “I dusted off some old textbooks. I bought some parts. I strapped into my kitchen counter and started prototyping.” As Orady developed Tonal – both the technology and the company – one of the most significant challenges wasn’t the engineering; it was convincing funders that an expert in enterprise infrastructure could succeed in the fitness sector. “The technology at Tonal, while advanced – we’re talking about a product with over 100 patents filed – was actually not the hard part. The hard part was it felt like I was starting from square one,” Orady described. He had to prove his concept again and again. “I would carry the prototypes around in a hard case and I would show up and bolt this to someone’s desk and say, ‘Pull on this.’”
Orady’s persistence and vision eventually broke through and Tonal began to take off. He established partnerships with iconic athletes like Serena Williams, LeBron James and Steph Curry. Like many at-home fitness companies, Tonal took another leap during the pandemic. Now, with the company solidly profitable, Orady has taken a couple of steps back, first handing over the CEO title so he could focus on technological development and, since January, stepping aside from his full-time role while maintaining his Tonal connection as a member of the board.
That transition has allowed Orady to look ahead once again. “I’m definitely going to start another company,” he asserted. “I need to start thinking about building the next thing. I’m working through a bunch of different AI ideas and trying to figure out what it is that I’m going to build next, but somehow consulting gigs keep landing in my lap, helping other entrepreneurs.”
A significant amount of the advice and guidance Orady can offer those entrepreneurs connects back to his engineering roots. “Engineering is problem solving,” he said. “Whether you’re engineering a piece of technology or you’re engineering an organization that needs to operate and solve problems, what I have found is there was no effort in translating engineering skills from building chips to building systems to building organizations.”
Orady, who was inducted into the McMaster Alumni Gallery in 2022, will be at the Faculty of Engineering convocation ceremony in June to receive an honorary doctorate, the seventh Mac degree earned by his family. When his mother, a two-time Mac graduate herself and one of the first 25 women to earn an engineering PhD in Canada, heard the news, “I cried and cried and cried,” she said. “I think his late father is very happy right now.”
Aly Orady will be back on campus to speak about his entrepreneurial journey on June 16, 2025. Register now for the event!
Are you a good fit for an Enginuity story? Get in touch with our Alumni Office at engalum@mcmaster.ca.
