Navigation you feel in your wrist. No screen. No audio. A vibration that says go this way - and stays quiet when you're right.
In 2017 an ultramarathon runner named Simon Wheatcroft ran the New York City Marathon without a guide, a cane on a friend's shoulder, or a voice in his ear. He is blind. He crossed a good stretch of the course - around 15 miles - steered by nothing but a wearable buzzing on his wrist. This is the sort of thing that either becomes a viral clip and disappears, or becomes a company. In Haptic's case it became a company.
Haptic - which spent its first several years as WearWorks - is the New York outfit that built the wearable. The company's argument is quietly radical and easy to underrate: we have spent roughly a century designing computers for the eyes and a few decades designing them for the ears, and we have treated touch as a novelty, a buzz in your pocket to tell you a text arrived. Haptic thinks that's a mistake worth about 1.85 billion people - the number of humans who live with some form of disability, many of whom cannot always look at a screen or listen to a voice.
Haptic started as a single device and has since split its patented approach into a wearable, an app, an AI layer, and an SDK. The bet: if touch really is an interface, developers should be able to build with it.
A wrist-worn band that guides you along a route through vibration alone - like a hand on your shoulder nudging you through a crowd, no map to check.
The patented engine that turns GPS and map data into touch: silence when you're on course, escalating buzz as you drift off the line.
An AI layer that adapts tactile patterns and guidance to context and behavior, so the feedback fits the moment instead of buzzing blindly.
A toolkit for embedding tactile navigation into other apps, maps, rideshare, and hardware - an invitation to give software a sense of touch.
Most feedback systems nag you constantly. HapticNav builds a "virtual corridor" and only speaks up when you leave it. Being on the right path feels like nothing at all - which is exactly the point.
No vibration. Complete quiet. The absence of a signal is the "you're fine" signal.
A gentle pulse appears the moment you veer, pointing you back toward the line.
The further you stray, the stronger it gets. The mistake and the correction scale together.
Touch is the next frontier in digital communications.
There's a well-worn truth in accessibility design that Haptic is essentially wagering its business on: build something well for the people who need it most, and everyone else tends to want it too. Curb cuts were poured for wheelchairs; now everyone rolls their luggage over them. Closed captions were for the deaf; now they run silently in every gym and airport bar. Screen-free, audio-free navigation is being designed for blind and low-vision users - but in an era of screen fatigue and hands-full commutes, a device that guides you without asking you to look has an obvious second life for people who can see perfectly well.
That's roughly the logic behind the partnerships. Haptic integrated its SDK with Mapbox, signed a Letter of Intent with Uber to help guide low-vision riders, and has done research work backed by the National Science Foundation and Google for Startups. None of that arrived because the company asked politely. It arrived because it did the improbable thing once - the marathon - and improbable-thing-done-once is the most persuasive slide in any deck.
Kevin Yoo, the CEO and co-founder, trained as an industrial and product designer at Pratt Institute before deciding that touch deserved to be a language rather than a notification. Keith Kirkland, the co-founder and Chief Haptics Officer, anchors the tactile-design side of the house. The company runs lean - roughly 18 people - out of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which puts it closer to New York's art-and-design gravity than to Silicon Valley's.
The money is modest and deliberate. Haptic has raised on the order of $390,000 across its seed-stage life, with backing that reads more like an accessibility-and-design coalition than a growth-fund pile-on: Quake Capital, SoundBoard Venture Fund, and accelerator support from Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator and URBAN-X. It is the kind of cap table you assemble when the problem is worth a decade and the exit math is secondary to the mission.
Simon Wheatcroft becomes the first blind person to run the NYC Marathon without sighted assistance, guided by the Wayband. Coverage follows from The New York Times, TED, CNN, Discovery Channel, and TechCrunch.
The company's most recent raise brings total funding to roughly $390K, backed by a coalition of accessibility- and design-minded investors and accelerators.
The rebrand signals the shift from one wearable to a family of products - HapticNav, HapticAI, and a developer SDK - and a thesis that touch is the third channel computers have ignored.
HapticNav is positioned for commercial and government use: rideshare, maps, emergency response, and defense - anywhere a screen or a voice fails.
Interviews with the founders and demos of touch-based navigation. Search these to see the Wayband guide a runner in real time.