Under 30 Alum Sean Petterson’s StrongArm Tech Raises $50 Million For Industrial Wearables To Reduce Workers’ Injuries

Five years ago, Forbes featured StrongArm Technologies founder Sean Petterson on the 30 Under 30 list for his company’s efforts to make wearable protective technology that helps industrial workers avoid injury. Today, Petterson, now 31, tells Forbes that the company has raised $50 million led by Drive Capital—its second financing in 12 months—to crank up production and sales of its wearable devices. With the new funding, StrongArm is valued at $200 million.

“Through Covid, the amount of attention on the space has solidified,” Petterson says. “There’s greater need for transparency, speed and continuity. We are the only company offering that for the manual workforce.”

As warehouses have struggled to process increased volume at speed, demand for StrongArm’s devices grew. Revenue reached some $10 million last year, and is expected to hit $25 million this year.

The Brooklyn-based company is something of a personal mission for Petterson. His father, a construction worker, had a fatal heart attack in his early-50s on the roof of a job site. An inventor as a kid, he studied product design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He came up with the idea for StrongArm during college and founded the company in 2011.

Workplace injuries are a major problem for blue-collar workers—StrongArm says that more than 38,000 injuries occur every hour worldwide—but wearables have been tough to design and slow to live up to their promise. StrongArm’s first exoskeletons, designed to reduce arm fatigue, avoid muscle strains and prevent back injuries, went through multiple iterations. A first win came in 2015 when industrial conglomerate 3M took a minority stake in the business.

StrongArm’s focus on preventing worker injuries led it from exoskeletons to small devices that generate data—and lots of it.

Soon after, StrongArm began rethinking its focus on exoskeletons. Companies were asking for data, and Petterson realized that the answer to workplace injuries would be found in smaller devices—and lots of data. Its current wearables are small enough to attach to a hip or to place between the shoulder blades with an X-pack harness. Yet they show significant details about how a worker’s body moves through space, as well as information about the environment, thanks to 25 different sensing inputs. That data can unlock small operational adjustments to improve worker safety.

To date, the company has deployed more than 30,000 of its wearables for use by workers of customers that include Walmart, Albertsons and Toyota.

“What we are talking about here is a fundamental cultural change in how we monitor and value industrial labor,” Petterson says. “Once the clients saw the impact the data could have, it was an obvious pivot for us.”

Drive Capital partner Nick Solaro says that pivot was crucial to his decision to invest. When he first met Petterson four or five years ago, he passed on investing because of the company’s focus on exoskeletons. But when Petterson and chief operating officer Matt Norcia circled back last fall to show off their new data-centric approach, he was interested. “When we started calling customers and speaking with people on the front lines, they were saying, ‘You don’t understand how effective this is. A 3-4-5% reduction in material handling injuries would be a victory, and with StrongArm it is close to a 40% reduction,’” says Solaro, who now joins StrongArm’s board of directors.

Walmart, the retailing goliath known for its heavy testing of new technologies, started testing StrongArm’s technology in 2018 at a grocery distribution center in Gordonsville, Virginia. A small test led to a larger one at multiple facilities. By last May, it had deployed StrongArm’s devices to 6,000 associates in 18 buildings. Walmart said in a blog post in May that ergonomic related injuries for workers who used the devices fell by nearly 65% in the first year, and dropped an additional 27% in year two and 16% in year three. “Not only were the results consistent, but it was getting better over time as the data set grew,” Solaro says. “It is not a leap that we should be able to replicate these results across logos.”

That consistency and improvement is crucial as the risk of workplace injury has grown along with the stresses on the supply chain as ecommerce deliveries ballooned during the pandemic, warehouses struggled to keep staffing levels up and consumers conditioned by Amazon’s speed demanded faster deliveries.

The cost for StrongArm starts at $22.50 per worker per month. That cost, Petterson says, is offset by decreased workplace injuries and their resulting expense for lost work days and insurance costs. StrongArm is beginning to work with insurers, though Petterson declines to name them or disclose details.

With the $50 million in cash, the company plans to increase its R&D on other potential products and expand its sales to additional industries, including heavy manufacturing and construction. “Manufacturing is the next logical jump,” Petterson says. “Construction is highly important to us given my background and passion around that.”