Guardhat Doubles Revenue as Companies Prioritize ESG, Worker Safety Investments

DETROIT, Jan. 26, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Guardhat, a pioneer of end-to-end connected worker solutions, announced it doubled revenue in 2021, year-over-year, and ended the year with over $30M in orders under contract. Industrial organizations sought its unified platform to keep frontline workers safe and connected.

The Guardhat Platform has quickly become the platform of choice 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 ESG reporting requirements.

"Our platform creates the IIoP – or 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 2-3x 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 $18M in a Series B round.

Growth drivers:

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.

"The market response Guardhat is seeing aligns with what we've seen at a macro level," said Peter Bussey, principal research analyst, Sustainability, EHS, and Connected Frontline Workforce at LNS Research. "The pandemic brought a resurgence of the EHS business function and the crucial role it plays in risk mitigation. But we are also seeing EHS transformation projects offering a greater ROI at an operational level. Those leading the pack see 6.8 to 18.5 percent better relative performance versus laggards on key operations and financial metrics like net profit margin, capacity utilization, and more.

People and product growth:

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+ years of experience in operations and commercial growth with U.S. Steel, including helping to improve lagging indicator safety results 10x 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 20+ integrations, including with 3M Peltor headsets and Kestrel sensors, software integrations with SAP EHS Management, IBM Maximo, Microsoft Azure, AWS, and more.

Awards, recognitions, and certifications:

This past year, the company was recognized by OH&S (Occupational Health and Safety) magazine IoT (Internet of Things) Product of the Year awards, Tracxn Top Emerging Startups 2021, the National Safety Council's Green Cross for Safety awards, Plant Engineering's Product of the Year awards.

Guardhat achieved System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type I for security and confidentiality compliance, and received Class 1 Division 1, IECEx and ATEX Zone 1 certifications for its Communicator smart hardhat for use in hazardous locations in partnership with i.safe MOBILE GmbH.

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About Guardhat
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 ingest, manage and analyze unstructured data; easy to deploy monitoring and reporting software; innovative, wearable technology; and a growing ecosystem of partner integrations. With Guardhat, companies can monitor worker location, health and work environment to speed reaction time and help proactively solve safety challenges. Guardhat is headquartered in Detroit, Michigan and operates globally. The company holds 13 patents in real time location systems, wearable solution design and connected worker software. For more information, visit: www.guardhat.com.

SOURCE Guardhat