Kevin Turpin 
TLDR: Today we launched a new big idea at weavix, built on a simple belief: communication isn’t enough. You’ve got to understand. According to the latest federal data, a U.S. worker died on the job every 104 minutes in 2024. We exist so that what the frontline knows reaches the people who need it, in time to act.
Picture this.
It’s 5:40 on a Thursday morning. Rob, a maintenance guy on second shift, notices a guard that’s been pulled off a conveyor. Rob keys his radio to tell the line. The operator who most needs to hear it is new, only speaks Spanish, and is standing next to a compressor. He hears a noise. Keeps working so he stays on track. Many of us have watched some version of this play out all too many times.
Most days, everybody goes home, ready for a hot meal and some family time. But not always. A U.S. worker died on the job every 104 minutes in 2024. That’s 5,070 people in one year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s horrible and unacceptable. And communication is only a small part of the problem. In construction, deaths among Hispanic workers more than doubled from 2011 to 2022, and language barriers are a named cause (CPWR, December 2024).
My senior leadership team spent the last few months together thinking about these problems. We asked ourselves once again what we can do, and what we truly weavix stand for. Today we’re sharing our North Star with you if for no other reason than it helps us articulate it clearly.
As some of you know, my brothers and I started weavix® in 2019 after years of running PK Specialty Services, a global industrial services business. We had zero way of knowing where our workers were, proving the work was done, or finding someone who needed help. Nothing we could buy solved it. So we started weavix and built Walt (after a few previous misses), and we’ve kept building it alongside the crews who use it every day.
Here’s where we landed. Communication is only the starting point to what we do. Talking more doesn’t make a site safer. Understanding does: the crew on the floor and the leaders running the operation both knowing what’s happening, while there’s still time to act. The people closest to the work see problems first, and most of what they know never reaches the people who need it.
What Do We Believe?
Here are the five things that kept coming up, after all our word wrestling matches.
- Work is the source of truth. The floor knows what’s really going on before any report does.
- Shared understanding creates value. A fix one shift figures out is only worth something if the next shift hears about it.
- Human capability transcends technology capability. The people doing the work are the experts. Technology should make them better, not second-guess them.
- Technology exists to remove barriers to understanding. If a tool puts another step between a worker and the person who needs to know, it’s the wrong tool.
- Removing friction is a philosophy, not a feature. It shapes how we build, how we support customers, and how we treat each other.
Why Do We Exist?
Put simply, we exist to unlock the value created where work happens.
What does that really mean? Every shift, the people doing the work learn things nobody else knows: the operator who hears a bearing going bad before it fails, the foreman who figured out a faster changeover, the new hire who sees a hazard nobody else noticed. That knowledge is the value. When it reaches the right person, a breakdown gets prevented, a fix gets shared across shifts, and someone goes home safe. But most of it never leaves the floor. It gets lost in a radio call nobody recorded, or it reaches leadership days later, filtered and summarized.
So our mission is to build the technology that arms the worker and wakes up the organization. Arming the worker means the person closest to the work can be heard and understood, in their own language, the moment they speak up. Waking up the organization means leaders finally see what’s actually happening, not what reached a report a week later.
Our team at weavix can’t do that alone. It takes our customers’ supervisors, foremen, and site leaders who translate what crews see and carry it upward. Communication is the wiring. Understanding is the power.
So our new refreshed message (as our crack marketing team puts it) is straightforward and simple, which is just like how we designed Walt.
know now. Direct Line to your Frontline.
What Does This Mean for the People We Serve?
It’s a promise that runs in two directions. For the people on the floor, it means what they see and say gets to the right person, in their language, right away. For the leaders running the operation, it means a clear view of what’s actually happening, not what reached a report a week later.
Walt and the weavix platform are how we keep that promise every day, but the promise comes first.
What This Looks Like in Practice
At Aspire Bakeries, real-time translation and mass alerts make fast, targeted evacuations possible across a multilingual workforce. When it counted, Shakai Busch, Senior EHS Manager, put it plainly: “We were able to get them out quick enough because we were able to communicate what was going on.”
That’s what understood looks like. And it isn’t one site. On average, a typical customer who has used our platform over a three-year period sees 43% faster incident response, which means hazards and line stops get handled before they spread.
What Comes Next for Us?
We’re just getting started. 40 Fortune 1000 and Forbes Global 2000 companies run on Walt today, and our radios have delivered 6.9 billion messages as of September 2026. Every one of those messages is a worker being heard.
I’m damn proud of this team. Thank you to every customer who has trusted us with their people, and to every worker who keys a Walt and tells us what’s really happening out there.
Kevin Turpin, Founder and CEO, weavix
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the new weavix brand message about? The new weavix brand message centers on understanding, not just communication. The mission is to build the technology that arms the worker and wakes up the organization, so what frontline workers know reaches the right person in their language, in time to act, and leaders see what is actually happening on the floor.
How often do workers die on the job in the U.S.? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 5,070 U.S. workers died from work injuries in 2024. That is one worker every 104 minutes. Construction accounted for 1,032 of those deaths, about 1 in 5, making it one of the most dangerous industries for frontline workers.
Why do language barriers matter for worker safety? Safety information only protects someone if they understand it. CPWR found deaths among Hispanic construction workers rose 107% from 2011 to 2022, with language barriers and a lack of Spanish safety materials named as causes. Multilingual crews need safety information delivered in a language every worker understands.
How does Walt help frontline workers understand safety messages? Walt is a rugged push-to-talk smart radio connected to the weavix platform. Messages are translated in 26+ languages with automatic dialect detection, transcribed so they can be read in loud areas, and saved to a searchable record. Alerts show who received and confirmed them, so supervisors know the message landed.
Who started weavix and why? Kevin Turpin and his brothers founded weavix in 2019 in Wichita, Kansas, after running PK Specialty Services, a global industrial services business. They had no way to locate workers, prove work was done, or find someone who needed help, so they built the Walt Smart Radio System and created the smart radio category.
What does weavix do? weavix turns what frontline workers already say into knowledge the whole organization can act on. Its Walt smart radios work like the radios crews already trust, while the weavix platform translates in 26+ languages with automatic dialect detection, routes every message to the right person, and keeps a searchable record. The company was founded in 2019 in Wichita, Kansas.
Start Here
If you lead safety or operations for a multilingual frontline crew, start with these:
- What frontline manufacturing workers told us about their tools
- Why Walt won a 2026 Pro Tool Innovation Award
When you’re ready to see Walt on your site: Book a Demo → weavix.com/request-demo
