The hard hat that learned to see. A sensor in a helmet, a mesh network across the site, and a live dashboard for the people building the world.
Founded 2017 · Riyadh · Dubai · San Francisco
WAKECAP, RIYADH - The company's mark. The device it is named for hides inside a standard safety helmet, replacing the ratchet knob workers already wear.
The Story
Every year the world pours trillions of dollars into building things - towers, refineries, entire cities rising from desert. And for all that money, the one input nobody could measure in real time was the workforce itself: who was on site, where, doing what, and whether they were safe. Paper sign-in sheets and radio calls were the state of the art. WakeCap set out to change that with the least disruptive tool imaginable - the helmet a worker already wears.
Founded in 2017 by Dr. Hassan Albalawi and Ishita Sood, WakeCap replaced the plastic ratchet knob inside a standard construction helmet with a small IoT sensor. The worker notices nothing different. The site, meanwhile, gains a nervous system. Each helmet reports location, movement, attendance and heat exposure over a wireless mesh network of beacons - one that needs no GPS, no cellular signal, no Wi-Fi and no grid power, so it works inside concrete cores and confined spaces where a phone goes dark.
That field data flows into a single owner's dashboard, where WakeCap fuses it with equipment, cameras, materials, documents and the construction schedule into one connected knowledge graph. The pitch is deceptively plain: give a project owner the same live operational picture a factory manager takes for granted. Today the technology has run across roughly $80 billion of active projects and tracked more than 150 million labor hours.
What It Does
At the edge sits the helmet sensor - a knob with a buzzer and a panic button that enables two-way alerts between a worker and the safety manager. Between the helmets runs the mesh, a self-healing web of beacons that keeps every person connected regardless of terrain or altitude. At the top sits the platform, translating raw signals into headcount, timekeeping, safety events, productivity and progress.
Because the data is live rather than reconstructed after the fact, the whole loop tightens. A safety incident triggers an alert in seconds. A crew that never showed up stops billing hours it did not work. A slipping schedule shows up as a trend, not a surprise at the monthly review.
The Problem
Construction is hostile to sensors: dust, heat, steel, height, and a workforce that moves constantly across a site with no reliable connectivity. Most digital tools built for offices simply fail there. So the industry defaulted to manual logs - slow, gameable, and blind to what happens between reports.
WakeCap's answer was not to demand new behavior but to instrument the behavior that already exists. The helmet goes on either way. The result is data on ghost-worker hours, heat risk, mustering during evacuations, and the hundred small inefficiencies that quietly inflate the cost of a megaproject.
By The Numbers
Figures are company-reported outcomes measured across deployments and may vary by project. Treat as approximate.
How It's Different
Rival connected-worker systems often lean on GPS badges or cellular tags - fine on a flat site, unreliable inside a rising concrete tower. WakeCap's bet on a power-independent mesh lets it cover the exact environments where visibility matters most and competitors thin out. And by hiding the hardware inside a helmet workers already wear, adoption stops being a change-management project.
The second edge is data fusion. Rather than selling a single-point tool, WakeCap positions itself as the owner's system of record - the layer that connects workforce, equipment, vision, materials, documents and schedule. That is a harder product to build and a stickier one to remove.
Where It Fits
WakeCap sits in the connected-worker and project-controls corner of construction technology, alongside names like Triax, Kwant.ai, Disperse, Buildots and Doxel. Its wedge is the Gulf megaproject - NEOM, Qiddiya, King Salman Park - where scale, heat and safety stakes make the case obvious, and where investor Wa'ed Ventures (Aramco) opened doors.
From that base the company is expanding outward: deployments in the UAE, US and Japan, offices in San Francisco, and in late 2025 the acquisition of Brazil's Trackfy. The market it is chasing is the entire gap between how much the world builds and how little of that building is measured in real time.
Business & Customers
B2B enterprise sales to owners and contractors: sensors and beacons deployed across a project, plus a platform subscription. Value is priced against safety, productivity and labor-cost savings.
Aramco, NEOM, Qiddiya, King Salman Park and BESIX, with projects in the UAE, US, Japan and Brazil. The buyer is typically the project owner seeking site-wide control.
Technology run across roughly $80 billion of active projects and 150M+ labor hours tracked - a footprint concentrated in the Gulf and expanding globally.
Timeline
Hassan Albalawi and Ishita Sood start WakeCap to digitize worksites with a helmet-mounted IoT sensor.
The company raises seed funding through the HAX hardware accelerator to build its IoT ecosystem.
Aramco's Wa'ed Ventures invests, opening the door to deployments on major Saudi projects.
Smart helmets deploy on flagship sites including NEOM, Qiddiya and King Salman Park.
UP.Partners leads a Series A to scale WakeCap's sensor-powered project controls globally.
WakeCap buys the Brazilian worker-safety company to expand its international footprint.
Partnerships
Collaboration to advance construction technology innovation across the GCC.
Mesh connectivity technology powering WakeCap's site-wide worker network.
Strategic investor and route to deployments on Aramco projects.
Amusements
The mesh works with no GPS, cellular or Wi-Fi - it holds inside concrete cores and confined spaces where phones die.
The same helmet device reads heat, watching for exhaustion as crews labor under the Gulf sun.
By replacing the ratchet knob, the sensor asks workers to change exactly nothing about their day.
FAQ
Share & Connect