Carriers Are Great at Managing Expenses. They’re Just Not Good at Deploying Technology.

Haytham Elhawary’s path to Kinetic runs through medical robotics — a PhD and postdoc spent at Imperial College and Harvard Medical School building robots designed to guide needles into the prostate, lungs, and liver with a precision and minimally invasive footprint no human hand could match. What eventually pushed him out of medical devices wasn’t a loss of interest in the technology; it was regulatory reality — getting any new medical device to market routinely took a decade, a pace fundamentally at odds with wanting to see real-world impact.

The personal thread that shaped what came next: Haytham grew up watching his mother, a nurse, get injured repeatedly over the course of her career — an experience that taught him early on that a workplace injury doesn’t stay at work. It follows a person home, affects their ability to provide for their family, and reshapes daily life well beyond the immediate physical recovery. That observation stayed with him until he met his co-founder, Aditya Bansal, an electronics and wearables specialist who’d previously built himself a wearable at IBM that let him read while running (paired with an early, not-yet-popular audiobook setup). Together, they set out to build a wearable specifically aimed at reducing workplace injuries — the company that became Kinetic.

In Episode 68 of InsurTechTalk, Haytham and I covered how Kinetic’s wearable actually coaches workers in real time, why partnering with existing workers’ comp carriers to deploy the technology didn’t work despite strong pilot results, and what ultimately pushed Kinetic to become an MGA itself.

About Haytham Elhawary

Haytham Elhawary is CEO and co-founder of Kinetic, a wearable technology and workers’ compensation MGA focused on reducing musculoskeletal injuries among industrial workers. Before Kinetic, he earned a PhD in medical robotics and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, building robotic systems for neurosurgery and needle-based procedures in the lung and liver. He co-founded Kinetic with Aditya Bansal, the company’s electronics and wearables lead.

A Global Injury Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

Haytham framed the underlying problem in stark terms: workers performing physically demanding industrial labor — construction, package delivery, manufacturing — face rising productivity expectations that have consistently outpaced investment in safety training. The result, by his account: roughly one million workers injured every day globally, with hundreds of billions of dollars spent annually on those injuries, the bulk of that cost concentrated in the US given its healthcare system. Historically, he argued, this has simply been absorbed as an accepted cost of doing business rather than treated as a genuinely solvable problem.

He connected this to the standard workplace safety pyramid: preventing the injuries and deaths that sit at the top of that pyramid requires focused investment at the base — training, safety observation, and understanding directly from workers where they feel most at risk in their daily tasks. Kinetic’s founding bet was that most of these injuries are genuinely preventable, and that the single largest injury category — musculoskeletal injuries (back strains, torn muscles, twisted ankles) — was both common and disproportionately expensive because of how long recovery typically takes and how disruptive an extended absence is to the employer.

Real-Time Coaching, Not a One-Time Training Video

Kinetic’s wearable — a small device worn on the belt — is built around a simple insight: safe movement is a habit that has to be reinforced continuously, not something that sticks after a single annual training session. Haytham’s analogy: handing someone a weightlifting instructional video at the start of the year and expecting them to lift safely for the next twelve months is a recipe for injury; what actually works is closer to having a personal trainer present in the moment. The device delivers that in the form of real-time vibration feedback whenever it detects a high-risk movement — twisting the spine, for example — nudging the worker in the instant the risky movement happens, rather than in a classroom weeks or months earlier.

The device’s sensors are functionally similar to what’s already in a smartphone, but the underlying machine learning model was trained specifically for this use case: hundreds of workers wore sensors across their bodies during the training phase, allowing the system to learn to recognize specific high-risk movements — twisting, jumping down from vehicles, excessive bending — accurately across a wide range of body types and sizes.

Why Custom Hardware Became an Advantage, Not a Liability

Asked directly why Kinetic built its own hardware rather than relying on existing consumer devices — a fair challenge given how much harder and more capital-intensive hardware is than software, especially amid ongoing semiconductor supply constraints — Haytham reframed the tradeoff. Off-the-shelf devices like phones and smartwatches simply aren’t robust enough to perform reliably, every time, in an industrial environment. Once Kinetic accepted it needed to build its own device anyway, that constraint became an opportunity: the team could design specifically for durability, discretion, comfort, and — critically — worker engagement, rather than working around a general-purpose device’s limitations.

Solving the Adoption Problem With a Game, Not Just a Pitch

Haytham was candid about the real first hurdle in this category: getting workers to actually want to wear the device. A worker handed an unfamiliar wearable reasonably asks whether it has a camera or GPS, whether it’s tracking their breaks, and whether the data could get them fired — a legitimate skepticism about being monitored. Kinetic’s approach combines transparency (the device has no GPS or camera) with a value exchange workers already implicitly accept elsewhere — Haytham’s comparison: people accept that their phone tracks them constantly because the value they get back is worth the tradeoff, and the device needs to earn that same judgment.

Concretely, Kinetic added a screen and turned the safety data into a game: workers can see their own high-risk-movement count trending down day over day, and compete against colleagues at the same facility on the same metric — turning a safety compliance requirement into something workers actively engage with rather than passively tolerate.

From Free Pilot Product to a Quantified Loss Reduction

Kinetic’s initial go-to-market targeted large, sophisticated early adopters — self-insured Fortune 2000 companies with both budget for safety innovation and the internal analytical rigor to measure impact carefully. Haytham named Pepsi and Iron Mountain specifically as early clients who deployed the device to thousands of workers and pushed Kinetic hard on both product development and measurable outcomes.

After roughly three years of deployment data, Kinetic worked with an independent actuarial firm to quantify the real-world impact, comparing claims data before and after clients adopted the device. The results: a 55% average reduction in strain and sprain injuries, and a 72% reduction in lost workdays — in insurance terms, a reduction in both claims frequency and severity.

The Pivot: Why Workers’ Comp Was the Real Distribution Channel

With that data in hand, Haytham’s team recognized a bigger opportunity than continuing to sell direct to large enterprises one at a time: workers’ compensation insurance is mandatory for employers in high-hazard industries and represents a major line-item expense — meaning that bundling the wearable free into a workers’ comp policy, in exchange for materially reducing claims, could drive adoption far beyond what direct enterprise sales alone could achieve. Haytham described it as one of the genuine cases where a “win-win-win” claim actually holds: Kinetic gains distribution, the carrier reduces its claims costs, and the policyholder and its employees get a free safety tool that measurably reduces injuries.

Why Partnering With Carriers Directly Didn’t Scale

Kinetic’s first approach to this insurance pivot was straightforward: partner with existing workers’ comp carriers and let them deploy the wearable to their own book of business. The company ran pilots with several carriers over a couple of years, consistently generating strong results — but none of those pilots scaled into a meaningful, lasting distribution relationship.

Haytham’s diagnosis, arrived at after real reflection: in workers’ comp, roughly 70 cents of every premium dollar goes to claims, and roughly 30 cents to expenses (with margin in between) — and carriers, as an industry, have become genuinely excellent at two specific things: managing that expense ratio tightly, and investing premium dollars profitably in the period before claims get paid out. What most carriers are not structurally good at, in his assessment, is deploying new technology into their existing book of business — it simply isn’t a core organizational competency, regardless of how compelling the pilot data looks. That realization led to the conclusion that if Kinetic wanted this wearable-embedded workers’ comp model to actually work at scale, Kinetic itself had to become the MGA and take on underwriting directly, rather than waiting for an existing carrier to fundamentally change how it operates.

Becoming an MGA: A Year-Long Crash Course

The year before this recording (roughly 2021) became what Haytham called his personal crash course in insurance — learning workers’ comp mechanics, the distinction between an MGA and an MGU, underwriting, and reinsurance essentially from scratch. That education led to a partnership with Nationwide, under which Kinetic operates as an MGA offering workers’ comp coverage with its wearable bundled in at no additional charge — a program that had launched roughly two months before this conversation. Because underwriting authority sits with Kinetic itself (within guardrails set by Nationwide), the company can directly incorporate its own device data into underwriting decisions, a capability it wouldn’t have had relying purely on a traditional carrier partnership.

On the operational side, Haytham noted Kinetic already had a mature fulfillment operation in place from years of large-enterprise deployment — clients can request device replacements through a dashboard, receive a prepaid return shipping label automatically, and rely on Kinetic to handle onboarding, manager and worker training, and ongoing maintenance.

Advice for Building an IoT-to-MGA Business

Asked what advice he’d give a founder trying to follow a similar path — using cyber insurance as a hypothetical parallel example — Haytham offered three concrete points:

• Find a carrier partner, and be precise about your value. The clearest, easiest case to make to a prospective carrier partner is demonstrable impact on losses, not expenses. Most insurtech innovation historically concentrates on the expense side of the ledger (customer acquisition, claims handling, policy administration), which is a smaller, more margin-squeezed bucket by nature — genuine, provable loss reduction is comparatively rare and correspondingly more compelling to a data-driven carrier partner
• Bring proof, not just a pitch. Because insurance is a fundamentally data-driven industry, Kinetic’s multi-year track record of quantified injury-rate impact was what actually made the case, not the underlying technology story alone
• Start narrow and build a repeatable playbook before expanding. Kinetic deliberately launched with a small number of specific class codes, specific states, and a defined initial group of broker relationships — building out a working, provable playbook for broker relationships, underwriting, and measurable impact within that narrow scope before expanding further

Haytham also emphasized a related discipline: choosing exactly one front to genuinely innovate on. Kinetic’s chosen fight is underwriting and loss reduction specifically — not claims handling, not distribution innovation — and it deliberately works through traditional brokers rather than trying to disrupt every part of the value chain simultaneously.

Team and Growth

At the time of recording, Kinetic employed roughly 35 people and was hiring aggressively to build out its insurance operations specifically — brokers and underwriters among the new roles — with Haytham describing his own ongoing education into which underwriting metrics actually matter as a genuinely enjoyable part of the company’s evolution.

Advice: Why We Sleep

Asked for a closing recommendation, Haytham pointed to Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, describing it as genuinely transformative for him personally. As a founder with young children and a spouse alongside a demanding startup, he’d noticed himself steadily sacrificing sleep to make room for both work and family obligations; the book’s case for sleep’s outsized impact on health and performance prompted him to start going to bed earlier, which he said had already produced a noticeably positive effect on how he felt.

Key Takeaways

• Kinetic’s wearable delivers real-time vibration coaching for high-risk movements (like spinal twisting), functioning like an in-the-moment personal trainer rather than a one-time annual safety training session
• An independent actuarial analysis found the device reduced strain and sprain injuries by an average of 55% and lost workdays by 72% among clients — a reduction in both claims frequency and severity that became the evidence base for Kinetic’s later insurance pivot
• Kinetic deliberately built proprietary hardware rather than relying on phones or smartwatches, reframing the added cost and complexity as an advantage: purpose-built hardware could be engineered specifically for industrial-environment durability and worker engagement (via gamified competition) rather than general-purpose limitations
• Worker adoption depends on trust and perceived value, not just safety messaging — transparency about what data isn’t collected (no GPS, no camera), combined with gamification, was key to getting sustained daily usage
• Direct partnerships with existing workers’ comp carriers to deploy the technology produced strong pilot results but never scaled, because carriers are structurally optimized for expense management and float investment, not technology deployment — a core insight that pushed Kinetic to become an MGA itself
• Kinetic’s MGA partnership with Nationwide bundles its wearable free into workers’ comp policies, letting Kinetic directly incorporate its own device data into underwriting rather than depending on a carrier partner to adapt its own processes
• Haytham’s advice for IoT companies pursuing a similar MGA path centers on proving measurable loss reduction (not just expense-side innovation), bringing multi-year data as proof, and deliberately starting narrow — specific class codes, states, and broker relationships — before expanding