SIP Global Partners, a US-Japan headquartered VC firm, today announced its investment in the $11.25 million Series A round of KINETIC.  KINETIC is a New York-based developer of wearables devices that measure and improve industrial and workplace safety, reducing lost work days by up to 88%.  Other participants in the round include top-tier investors Crosslink Capital, Primary Ventures, Nationwide Ventures, Prologis Ventures and Ubiquity Ventures.  KINETIC’s Series A Round, which follows its $4.5 million Seed Round in October 2018, will help the company grow and scale its engineering, sales and marketing teams and support R&D. 

“We invested in KINETIC because we believe that bringing safety data to the industrial workplace will have a remarkable impact across sectors,” said Jeffrey Smith, General Partner of SIP Global Partners.  “Widespread adoption of digital workplace technology during COVID-19 has created strong momentum for KINETIC going forward.  Not only does KINETIC’s technology have massive potential in the US, but also across Asia, the GCC and globally.”

“We selected SIP as a strategic investor because we value their operational expertise, knowledge and insight. Additionally, one of the most unique advantages of partnering with SIP is they can quickly accelerate our worldwide expansion, especially into strategic markets in Asia.”    

KINETIC’s Bluetooth-enabled, battery-powered and fully rechargeable Reflex, which fastens to pant waistbands with a clip, has sensors that detect injury-causing activities. Algorithms classify motions like bending, overreaching and twisting and self-calibrate each session to trigger alerts, enabling workers to toggle between information stored on the device and steps or goals set by employers.  Reflex creates a map of wearers’ bodies that measures angles, changes in height and hip movement to estimate how their back is contorting.  Employees receive daily and weekly breakdowns of activity, as well as additional insights and progress toward benchmarks. Employers see metrics by job type or individual, type of high-risk posture and predictive analytics that attempt to shed light on the root cause of each injury.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, KINETIC introduced a new program that enables Reflex devices to encourage social distancing between workers. The devices vibrate lightly whenever employees are too close to each other, and a real-time dashboard of contacts allows for daily active monitoring with contact tracing. Managers can see how many exposures an employee has had during a given time frame, exactly who those exposures involved, the duration of each exposure and the segment of the workforce where they occurred.

KINETIC’s customers range from companies in retail and logistics to manufacturing industries, including Iron Mountain, JLG Industries and Mammoth Inc. along with six of the Fortune 50.  Tens of thousands of workers are currently using KINETIC devices in hundreds of facilities around the world.

According to Statista, the industrial IoT market is expected to grow to $110 billion by 2025, accelerated by worldwide implementation of 5G.

“Some of our early investments in cloud and edge-based enterprise software in such startups as Croquet and Fable have been vastly accelerated in a distributed workplace,” said Matthew Salloway, SIP Global Partners Co-Founder and Managing Partner.  “With KINETIC, our third investment in startups shaping the future of work, we’re bullish on the potential of IoT and data to fundamentally impact industrial operations for years to come.” 

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About SIP Global Partners
SIP Global Partners invests in transformative US technology startups poised for large scale growth in Asia.  SIP leverages its dual-headquarters in the US and Japan, its principals’ 40-year history of building global companies and unique market access to accelerate growth for portfolio companies in Asia, including Japan, ASEAN and the GCC.  For more information, visit sipgp.com. 

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About KINETIC
KINETIC provides wearable technology and a software analytics platform that helps reduce workplace injuries and protects workers from COVID-19. To date, tens of thousands of workers have worn the product in hundreds of facilities all around the world with a 54% reduction in workers’ compensation claims costs. Customers include companies in the retail, logistics and manufacturing industries, including 6 of the Fortune 50. KINETIC was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in New York. Learn more at 

https://wearkinetic.com/.