- Speaker #0
which is a statement involving the general public's activity on the basis of the coming and the coming of the government of the United Nations. And the piece is a report of the work of the I am the president of the United Nations Committee on Human Rights, and I am the president of the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. I am part of the community of Maryland, and I am going to be a part of the movement to protect the land of the West. I am a member of the community of Maryland, and I am going to be a part of the movement to protect the land of the West.
- Speaker #1
The construction industry is in full swing. New standards, use of materials, energy consumption are our stakes. My name is Richard Mita, I am a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Sinax. At Sinax, we digitize the construction materials industry. My passion, the digital applied to sectors that did not expect it. In the builders, I interview industry visionaries to inspire you in your own environmental, digital transformation. and managers. Welcome to Les bâtisseurs, the podcast for those who build today for tomorrow. Welcome to this new episode of Les bâtisseurs, in partnership with Buildworlds and Contech. I am today at Léonard's and I am with Hassan Albalawi. the founder of Wakecap, and I'm going to do it in English on this episode. Hello, Hassan.
- Speaker #2
Hello.
- Speaker #1
How are you?
- Speaker #2
Good. How about you?
- Speaker #1
I'm great. You know, you're from, so your company is based in Saudi Arabia?
- Speaker #2
Yes, we started there,
- Speaker #1
yeah. And then you're in Europe right now, and I'm sure you've got exciting stuff to share with us about what you do, why you're here. And maybe, first of all, if you can introduce yourself, please.
- Speaker #2
Sure. My name is Hassan Elbloui. I'm the CEO and founder of WakeUp. At WakeUp, we basically built a smart sensor that enabled us to build a project control, but in a smart way. So every product control you can think of today, it's like a process-based approach. We are trying to improve the process by actually using sensor to reduce a lot of the element in when it comes to the steps of product control. on that. basically touch up the safety, touch the productivity, efficiency on the site using sensors. And that's the new platform we are building. We started back in 2017. Today, we have more than 200,000 workers connected.
- Speaker #1
Everywhere in the world?
- Speaker #2
Yeah. So our main focus is actually in the Middle East. This is where we started. We got projects in the US. We got projects in Dubai, UAE. And Saudi for the moment, there are plans to expand to Europe, Japan, and Brazil. We are a 200-person company at the moment. We just closed our round a couple months ago with over $28 million. And yeah, it has been a fun journey to bring technology to this very tough industry.
- Speaker #1
And what were you doing before? Like, were you in the city?
- Speaker #2
Yeah. Oh, actually, no. So I got to this industry by mistake, I guess.
- Speaker #1
We're all here by mistake.
- Speaker #2
Exactly. Otherwise, I think if we realized what's going on, it would have been wise to avoid it. Just by the time you realize that, it's too late. You're already too into the game. I left. So I'm originally from Saudi in the northwest region in a city called Tabuk. And a lot of people know it by Neom. So this is where NEOM is.
- Speaker #1
So NEOM is like the futurist city and like this mega project in Saudi Arabia. Is that correct?
- Speaker #2
Exactly.
- Speaker #1
So you are involved in that project?
- Speaker #2
Yes, we are. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Our technology is being used there. I left in 2005 to the US and the first country I ever actually passed by was actually France. Believe me, it was a very tough kind of a trip for somebody who doesn't speak English going to the US. with a stop over in Paris. I got lost there, ashamed of that, but made it eventually after missing the flight. I went to the US, I spent 15 years there. I did my bachelor, master and PhD, all in electrical engineering. I went to Carnegie Mellon and Duke University, focusing on my thesis was on-chip machine learning. And one of the application was Drauzens detection, Hence the name. wake up. We built the first prototype was to detect drowsiness on construction workers.
- Speaker #1
Tell me what's drowsiness because you know my English is not that well.
- Speaker #2
Yeah absolutely drowsiness is the fatigue that you would like to measure using the brain signals so you want to see if people are let's say a bit too tired or sleepy on the project that was the problem that I thought need to be solved. I went to the construction site and they said, look, we have bigger problem than this. We don't care if the people are drowsy, not because we don't care, because we just don't know. There are actually bigger issues in the site. And one of the biggest issues in a very labor intensive business is they don't even know where people are. Okay. And the way that... that the problem was described to me, I really appreciated it because it gave me a very good context of how difficult to get technology into the field. And to simplify the problem, they said, okay, come to any of our projects. We have a lot of mega projects, thousands of people. Take any project, get 100 people, give them whatever solution you have. But there are three conditions. Condition Number 1. you're not allowed to talk to the workers. And the reason for that is training costs money, and they speak many languages. So if the solution requires training, usually it's not going to work. Number two, no site support. You cannot use electricity, you cannot use internet, because we don't have internet and electricity on the site. So do not depend on that when it comes. to these solutions. Number three, you need to leave the solution running for at least a month because they tried many solutions like GPS for tracking phones and others. The problem with these solutions, there are two types of problems. Problem number one, technical issues like battery will actually die, doesn't last for a month. And then there is the non-technical issues like people forget to charge the device or people forget the device. So these kind of challenges were described in that in that context. And when I dig deep into this problem, I figured out, oh, there is also privacy concerns when it comes to tracking people as well. So from day one, we started thinking about these challenges in such a way that we want to come up with a solution that requires no training, no site support, lasts for months, and doesn't invade people's privacy. So we came up with a wearable solution. that is a sensor integrated into the hard hat. The worker needs to do nothing but to wear the hard hat. There is no GPS. It only works on the site using a battery-powered mesh network. So the mesh network is deployed in the site. It's very scalable, expands with the site. We use the mesh network to connect the project, but also... to monitor the location inside the project. That solution has improved significantly when we are given that challenge by one of the largest contractors. That contractor actually became the first investor after we developed that solution. The solution today can last instead for one month, a year and a half. They're being deployed in thousands of hard hat today, more than 200,000 hard hat deployed, more than 150 million man hour got logged on the system. And the solution today is capable of not only like monitor where people are, but also is equipped with a couple of features like fall detection, has a panic button. We use it for evacuation. We also have a sensor that tells if people are wearing their hard hat or not. So for example, if you are in the office, we're not expecting you to wear the hard hat. If you're on the site, you're expected to wear the hard hat. All this information has been so critical to improve safety and productivity on the site like never before. And this is where we evolved to become a data company that have so much information about, like, how can the job be done efficiently? as well as safely. Because a lot of people think about safety as, oh, it's just an additional non-productive thing that is required. The way we have looked at this is like, what is the best way to improve safety on the site? Reduce the number of people you need on the site. That's number one. If you improve productivity, you basically are improving the the safety big time. And there are like many use cases that we are able to uncover.
- Speaker #1
Let me just recap so that I understand correctly. So you were at some point a big client or a big prospect came to you and said, OK, I need to monitor the people and what they are doing. Like if they are just there. And this is how you came up with the idea of putting a sensor on people's helmet. And then with this sensor. that you connected through a mesh network, as you just said, or maybe today it's with LoRa or whatever network that you get from an IoT sensor or whatever. You were able to monitor and to track every worker on its site. That's what I understood. Yes,
- Speaker #2
that's correct. But without a GPS.
- Speaker #1
Without the GPS, of course. Without the GPS, because what Hassan was saying, that he's using a sensor which is like an IoT. types of sensor that maybe you design yourself or maybe maybe you design yourself yourself the whole thing we had to build it otherwise didn't work off the shelf exactly so you designed it you put it and then today based on this collection of data based on all this you are able to improve it and to go deeper into your platform am i correct absolutely so you can continue
- Speaker #2
Absolutely. Thank you so much for clarifying that.
- Speaker #1
That's what you guys are doing, right? And so now you were saying, I'm using that data for safety. And you were saying that the best way to increase safety is to reduce the number of people on site.
- Speaker #2
Exactly. Exactly. And one of the things that we realized that for improving project control, we needed to know what is supposed to happen on the site. In other words, we need to know the plan. So I can tell you there are like, let's say, 300 people on the site. Is it good or bad? Well, we don't know until we know what was supposed to happen. That's why we went and acquired a company that do schedule management. And it's called Cruise by Core. They are based in the Silicon Valley. Amazing team, amazing product that integrates with the schedule and link the schedule to location. What we do is we basically link our location to now to the schedule so we can tell you exactly if you have enough people or not. And that happened in multiple levels. Level number one, do you have all the people required on the site? That's like basically by looking at what is planned and what is happening at the moment. This has been very effective when you look at critical activities. And instead of waiting for the end of the week to realize that nobody was on the site as expected, or for sometimes legitimate reason, like they didn't get the permit, or they have issues with the road or the weather. But at least you got to know very early on the process in such a way that allow you to have some sort of control in improving the productivity, either by increasing the number of people you need. or taking care of the issue in hand. The other way is validating what's being reported as well. Okay. So that basically has been very effective in the sense of knowing exactly how many people came to the site instead of relying on manual reporting, which is prone to errors and over-reporting. We were able to eliminate these mistakes, which helped in planning better, again, improving the productivity. The second dimension of what we use a lot, which is the safety. We have today clients like Aramco, even Total in joint venture with Aramco, have been utilizing the tool to improve the safety and ensuring, for example, nobody comes to the site unless they have all the safety certificates, if they are fit to work. we have Many cases, and I'm going to mention only one example that actually triggered the lack of Total and others to reconsider the use of such solution, despite it actually have challenges with the privacy, is to use it for safety purposes because the incentives in the site is not really well aligned. I'll give you an example. If people are getting, let's say, paid overtime. We noticed when somebody is sick and have a sick leave where they actually have the full right not to show up on the site, they still take the risk and show up on the site because they want to go for the overtime.
- Speaker #1
Yes.
- Speaker #2
And if they don't go, they will still get paid, but not with overtime. In fact, there are fatality were actually uncovered because of this. And the whole root cause analysis that was. basically hidden in ways that, well, the worker wasn't on the site. It turns out because they were using WakeUp, they were able to trace back who was on the site and was it really the case of fatality? Was it on the site or off the site? So these kind of use cases allowed clients like Total, Aramco, and big other clients to mandate. the solution for safety purposes. Like the idea of knowing what really happened in the site is has been I would say underrated when we build it. We didn't like think oh the history of the location will be useful until investigation and incident let's say uncover these I would say unrealized unrealized values.
- Speaker #1
okay so now tell me more about what is weak cap is doing and what what what do you see yourself you know is in the next you know a couple of years or you know what do you see yourself in the next because you started as um you know a way to check if you know if people were there then you link that to the planning i'm sure you're gonna link that to uh the way that the the architecture or the plaid or the construction and the and maybe a bit you know, more than the planning, a bit on the construction side about, you know, where they are, and then you have the right number of people. What is the next step? What are the next steps?
- Speaker #2
Absolutely, absolutely. So think of it this way. Today, we don't know for a fact how much it takes to deliver a certain activity. We know the total cost, but we don't know the detail in such a way that we can compare which method is better. So ideally, you want to have a smart system that is a sensor-based project control platform that measure what happens, and then try to basically look at innovative ways to reduce the effort to deliver the same quantity. So if you look at construction, what is construction today? It's a set of activities. Each activity has three inputs and about... two outputs. The three inputs are people, equipment, material. They do something. And the output is a progress and a time. So they want to know how much was done of this activity and when. And if you look at this kind of simplified version of activities, you can imagine when we have a future where we use different kinds of robotics to reduce the element of resources like a human, like think of shoveling, like it's excavation. But if you use an excavator with, you will need much less people to deliver the same quantity of the material of taking, let's say in this case, dirt out of the ground. Imagine the same thing now happening where you have an automated workforce that is relied on robotics, relied in wireless, I call it, you know, like as our... challenges today in labor shortage and attracting more people to come to construction, most likely going to be driven by the fact that people like to control, let's say, robotics and other equipment in a much more complicated ways instead of multiplying people and rely on people to do all of that. There will be that vision to actually go to that direction. Now, How do we measure which activity we should actually be doing, how much we are spending, which tool is better to deliver the same amount of work? This is where we look at categorizing all the activities and measuring how much effort to enhance these kind of activities. And it's not going to be like a switch with flip and everything will have robotics on the side.
- Speaker #1
Not yet. Exactly. Do you see that already? Maybe not robotics, but maybe autonomous vehicles or some of this kind of stuff.
- Speaker #2
I mean, you see like in construction, you have to define three things every time you look for any solution. You need to know what type of product we're doing. Is it like oil and gas? Is it a high rise? Is it like you need to define the type? And then the second, you need to define the size. Is it a small project, middle project, big? Giga projects because every scale has a different need and then third location like actual market Because if you combine these things, let's take wake up wearable sensor very simple in the hardhat It can be used the same way anywhere. We have three different use cases that are so Interesting when you look at it as as a simple example like in the Middle East they are using it to automate payrolls So workers were at the end and it was it was actually ironic. So workers start coming to us and say, why do we still have a timekeeper, which is a role? Somebody sign off your numbers. They said, OK, but if I have my hard hat and we have all the hours, why do I still need to sign my hours by a person who might if you don't like me, you wouldn't give me all the hours. So they start wearing the hard hat to to basically prove. that they were there and their hours are logged. In fact...
- Speaker #1
Increased safety.
- Speaker #2
But from the worker perspective, it wasn't the safety driven. It was like the case of, okay, I kind of control my destiny. Now this is a proof that I was there for all these hours. So that's, let's say, one use case. You go to the US and the use case is the same solution being used to avoid fraudulent claims by workers who are actually basically claimed that they were, let's say, injured when they were on the site. Like, it's the same solution, but it's being used to ensure that people were on the site when the claims happened. A case in Japan, they want to use the solution to ensure people don't work a lot of hours. Because workers tend to love the work, I guess, a little bit too much. The contractor and the owners and the regulator are worried about workers spending too many hours on the site. The same solution, different use cases for different locations.
- Speaker #1
Okay, okay. Now, I'm conscious of the time that we have.
- Speaker #2
Yes.
- Speaker #1
What are your plans for Europe? Are you already there? Are you already here? What are your plans? And, you know, and then we'll finish on that.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, this is actually, I come to Europe almost on a yearly basis to understand what's the situation with monitoring the workforce on the construction site. I believe the safety use cases has proven themselves to be the entry to the market. There are many companies who are interested in investing in utilizing the sensor we developed to ensure all the people are on the site, have a panic button to optimize emergency response, evacuate people faster, and at the same time don't invade their privacy. So I believe from that perspective, we are ready. The reason we are not yet in Europe is that we are very busy in Saudi. We got a lot of projects. Okay. So, penetrating Saudi alone is taking 90% of our effort. Wow. I mean, we got... more like what two trillion dollar worth of a project in the coming 10 years so you can imagine we deploy thousands of devices a day in Saudi so we're pretty busy there but eventually we believe that starting with the safety use cases there will be other interesting use cases that will reveal themselves when the data comes this is the unknown unknown that we have seen in almost every market And I really enjoy coming to new market, but I also manage my expectation as it's a zero to one problem. It's not like just another expansion.
- Speaker #1
Okay, very good. Thank you very much, Hassan. You're welcome. And I know we are really hoping at some point that you come to Europe and you do that zero to one.
- Speaker #2
Absolutely. Looking forward to it.
- Speaker #1
Zero to one energy that you will put to come to Europe. Thank you very much, Hassan. Thank you very much for our listeners. And thank you to the Contact France and Bitworld to enable us to have this discussion together. And the best for you for WakeCAP.
- Speaker #2
You too. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
- Speaker #1
Thank you for listening to this episode until the end. If you liked it, don't forget to rate it and comment on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and talk about it around you. It helps me to make it known and motivate new guests to share their vision. And to continue this conversation, find me on LinkedIn.
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