The walkie-talkie is a triumph of industrial design, and also a profound failure. It solved the problem of getting a voice from one hard hat to another, but it did nothing to solve the real problem, which is that the person wearing the hard hat is usually trying to fix a million-dollar machine with a greasy copy of a service manual in one hand and a phone in the other. The cost is measured in downtime, and downtime is measured in dollars per minute. Airwave, a two-year-old startup from Indianapolis, thinks the answer is to replace the walkie-talkie with a pair of smart safety glasses that can see what you see, and an AI that can hear what you ask.
It is a classic case of a small wedge opening a big door. The initial product is a push-to-talk app that looks, on the surface, like a modernized version of a team radio. But the wedge is the AI layer that connects a worker’s voice to a company’s entire operational knowledge base. Instead of calling a supervisor to ask for a part number, a technician can ask the glasses, “What’s the torque spec for this bolt?” and get an answer read back from the service manual. The glasses can record a procedure, automatically generate a report, and share a live video feed with a remote expert. The promise is not just faster communication, but the elimination of communication about things that should already be documented.
A wedge into the industrial workflow
Airwave is not the first to put a camera and a microphone on a worker’s face. The market for assisted reality and smart glasses in logistics and manufacturing is crowded, from established players like RealWear and Vuzix to software platforms like Atheer. What separates Airwave is its focus on voice as the primary interface and its insistence on starting with the mundane, critical task of simply talking to a manual. Founder Pankaj Prasad, who previously co-founded the events software company DoubleDutch and later worked at Salesforce, is betting that frontline workers, whose hands are perpetually occupied, will adopt a tool that requires no typing, no swiping, and no looking away from the job.
The company’s early traction is measured in capital. It has raised a total of $4 million in seed funding from a group of investors including Cortical Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, and High Alpha [PitchBook]. The round, which closed in April 2025, suggests a belief that the industrial communication stack is ripe for an upgrade that goes beyond a simple app [climateinsiders.substack.com, 2025].
The team behind the glasses
Prasad’s background is in building and selling software to enterprises, first at DoubleDutch and later in product management at Salesforce [TechCrunch, 2016] [Crunchbase, 2026]. That experience in navigating large organizational sales cycles is likely as valuable as any technical credential for a company selling into factories and field service teams. The company is based in Indianapolis, a city with a deep manufacturing heritage, and counts Charley Huggett, whose LinkedIn profile shows experience at Golden State Foods, among its early team members [LinkedIn, 2026]. The presence of High Alpha, an Indianapolis-based venture studio, as an investor points to a local network being leveraged for early customer development.
The competitive field of view
Airwave enters a field with several established and well-funded competitors, each with a slightly different angle on the same problem of connecting deskless workers.
| Company | Primary Focus | Key Differentiator |
|---|---|---|
| Weavix | Push-to-talk audio platform | Software-only, device-agnostic network for industrial communication |
| Relay | Rugged cellular-connected smart devices | Dedicated hardware (smartphone-like device) for frontline teams |
| Theatro | Voice-controlled wearable computers | Voice-first wearable computer for warehouse and retail workers |
Airwave’s table stakes are the push-to-talk functionality and group messaging that Weavix and others provide. Its proposed moat is the integration of that communication layer with a visual AI assistant, accessed through smart glasses, that can understand context and retrieve information. It is a hardware-plus-software bet in a market where many have chosen to be one or the other.
Where the wheels could come off
The risks for Airwave are layered, like the technology it is selling. The first is hardware adoption. Asking a workforce to wear smart glasses every day is a bigger behavioral ask than downloading an app. The glasses need to be comfortable, durable, and offer clear enough value to overcome inertia. The second is data integration. The AI’s utility is only as good as the manuals, part lists, and institutional knowledge it can access. Connecting to a legacy enterprise resource planning system or a decades-old PDF repository is a notorious implementation challenge.
Finally, there is the question of focus. The company’s website lists use cases for technicians, inspectors, and even sales teams needing customer information [airwave.us]. Spreading early resources across too many personas could dilute the product before it finds its essential wedge. The most plausible path is to dominate a single, painful workflow,like equipment repair in a specific industry,and expand from there.
The next twelve months
The $4 million seed round is runway to prove the model. The milestones to watch for are not vague “enterprise pilots” but specific, repeatable sales. Landing a first major customer in a vertical like manufacturing, logistics, or utilities would be a signal that the value proposition resonates. The company will also need to demonstrate that its custom vision models, which it says can be trained for specific equipment and workflows, actually reduce error rates or shave minutes off repair times [airwave.us].
On the back of an envelope, the unit economics start to make sense if the glasses can cut downtime by even a small margin. If a critical machine in a factory costs $500 per hour in lost production when it is idle, and a repair that normally takes an hour can be done in 50 minutes because the technician doesn’t have to stop to look up a schematic, that’s over $80 of value per incident. At scale, across hundreds of technicians and thousands of incidents, the math justifies a significant software and hardware subscription.
Airwave’s real competition is not just other smart glass companies. It is the deeply ingrained, inefficient, but profoundly reliable habit of picking up a walkie-talkie and yelling for help. To win, Airwave must make that habit feel as antiquated as shouting down a hallway.
Sources
- [PitchBook] Airwave funding and investor profile
- [climateinsiders.substack.com, 2025] Airwave closes seed round
- [TechCrunch, 2016] DoubleDutch layoffs and Pankaj Prasad role
- [Crunchbase, 2026] Pankaj Prasad career history
- [LinkedIn, 2026] Charley Huggett profile and Airwave affiliation
- [airwave.us] Airwave product descriptions and use cases