DETROIT—Guardhat, the Detroit-based developer of smart hard hats and other worker protection technologies, announced it doubled revenue in 2021, year-over-year, and ended the year with over $30 million in orders under contract.
The Guardhat Platform is being adopted among high-risk industrial operations—including the oil and gas, chemical, construction, mining and metals, energy, and manufacturing industries. Organizations are looking to the platform for real-time risk management and reporting capabilities to fulfill expanding environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting requirements.
“Our platform creates the IIoP—the Industrial Internet of People—for live insight into what workers face with ability to connect, support and collaborate in real-time,” said Saikat Dey, co-founder and CEO of Guardhat. “We expect to keep this momentum up by putting the frontline worker at the center of our strategy. We forecast two to three times revenue growth with margins greater than 75% in the years ahead.”
Beyond revenue and orders, in 2021, Guardhat grew its team, user base, and ecosystem of partnerships, secured a patent for its social-distancing application, earned intrinsically safe certifications for its innovative wearable tech, and raised over $18 million in a Series B round.
Customer and revenue growth has been fueled by serious injury and fatality rates in high-risk industries. The Guardhat system offers immediate impact as the only human-centric connected worker platform with centralized and extensible safety management and monitoring software, and ruggedized wearable devices from the company or third parties.
In the past year, Guardhat kicked off new projects across multiple industries and continents with customers including Barton Malow, Caterpillar, Big River Steel, Ferrovial, Jardine Schindler, Snap-on, U.S. Steel, two of the largest freight rail networks in North America, one of the world’s largest lumber companies, and others.
To meet demand and expand capabilities, Guardhat hired more than 30 new employees in 2021, with more to come in 2022. New leadership hires to further accelerate platform development and customer adoption include:
- Doug Matthews joined as chief growth officer to lead sales, marketing, and solutions teams, bringing 30-plus years of experience in operations and commercial growth with U.S. Steel, including helping to improve lagging indicator safety results ten times over BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) industry standards.
- Nirmal Chudgar is the chief product officer at Guardhat. He brings experience in worker safety wearables as a startup founder himself, and experience in product, marketing, systems integration and engineering with Federal Signal and Motorola Solutions.
- Praveer Kumar signed on as Guardhat’s president of engineering, product, and operations. He has more than 20 years of experience in technology and solutions development from roles with Acxiom, Yahoo, and Finxeria – where he was a co-founder, board member, and chief product and technology officer.
- Sarah Kalhorn serves as chief marketing officer, with experience in industrial technology marketing and communications supporting both F500 and startups, including 3M, Bridgestone, Desktop Metal, nVent, Oshkosh Defense, Pentair, Procore, project44, Rockwell Automation and more.
- And Tim Shield, who as vice president of platform strategy and sales, joined from McKinsey & Co. where he was an engagement manager serving a wide array of energy and industrial clients, after serving 6-plus years with the U.S. Navy as a Nuclear Submarine Officer.
The growing Guardhat team will expand adoption, system functionality, ecosystem integrations, while streamlining and improving user-experience and analytics features.
An expanding ecosystem:
In 2021, Guardhat expanded its relationship with Siemens, beyond using the SIMATIC RTLS (Real Time Location Services) in Guardhat devices, with a co-deployment in Singapore. Additionally, Guardhat partnered with domain expert integrator CBT (CB Technologies), global safety solutions provider United Safety, and joined the Deloitte Smart Factory @ Wichita initiative to further expand sales, deployment, and support for customers.
This year also saw integrations with a wide array of leading devices to expand capabilities and adoptability for the Guardhat solutions, including:
- New connected safety devices, including devices from Extronics, Equivital and a leading LoRaWAN device designed for intrinsically safe environments,
- Rombit collision avoidance solutions,
- Two leading dosimeters for mobile radiation dosage detection,
- RKI Instruments mobile gas detectors, as well as three other leading mobile gas detectors,
- RealWear assisted reality wearable devices,
- Vuzix hands-free assisted reality smart glasses,
- And the BioTrac biometric bands from SlateSafety
These integrations add to the existing Guardhat Platform ecosystem, which includes more than 20 integrations, including with 3M Peltor headsets and Kestrel sensors, software integrations with SAP EHS Management, IBM Maximo, Microsoft Azure, AWS, and more.
Guardhat is pioneering connected technology to improve safety and collaboration with and among frontline industrial workers. The company offers a proprietary connected worker platform –unrivaled in its ability to manage and analyze unstructured data; easy to deploy monitoring and reporting software; innovative, wearable technology; and a growing ecosystem of partner integrations. More at www.guardhat.com.