Workplace safety software provider Intenseye Inc. said today it has closed on what is the largest-ever funding round in its category after raising $64 million in an investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The Series B round also saw the participation of existing investors such as Insight Partners, Point Nine and Air Street Capital, and brings the company’s total amount raised to north of $90 million.
Like many software providers these days, Intenseye is all about artificial intelligence. The startup has built what it says is an enterprise-ready computer vision AI platform that provides increased visibility into indicators, such as unsafe acts or conditions, that often lead to workplace injuries or cause workers to become ill.
According to Intenseye, such indicators are often very subtle and go unnoticed by human safety auditors. It says it alerted its customers to more than 36 million of these indicators last year. It uses strategically placed cameras and computer vision AI to spot workplace risks, which might be something such as an oil spillage on a factory floor or a worker operating a machine without wearing the correct safety gear.
Using the insights provided by its platform, environmental, health and safety teams can implement changes to enhance workplace safety, improve efficiency and ensure compliance with industry best practices, resulting in fewer accidents at work.
The company plans to use the money from today’s round to expand its platform’s capabilities, with one item on the menu being the incorporation of new generative AI models that will power an anonymization feature to further “ethical AI” practices. It also wants to enable “mobile support” for its platform to expand its impact.
The prevention of workplace accidents is certainly a laudable goal. According to the International Labor Organization, more than 3 million people across the world die every year as a result of workplace accidents and diseases, while 400 million more suffer injuries in their place of employment. Moreover, a study by the American Industrial Hygiene Association shows that the direct and indirect costs stemming from workplace accidents could be as high as $3 trillion a year, with the U.S. alone suffering annual losses in excess of $50 billion from the unplanned downtime caused by such incidents.
Computer vision has recently been hailed as an ideal solution for workplace accident prevention. Gartner Inc. said in a recent study that the technology is uniquely able to identify hazards in real time and prevent incidents. “CIOs must create a strategy to leverage computer vision to improve worker safety and well-being, while mitigating the associated risks,” Gartner recommends.
Intenseye says its product delivers such a strategy out of the box, with the added benefit that its platform integrates irreversible privacy measures that guarantee workers’ anonymity by stripping any personally identifiable information from the video it captures.
Intenseye Chief Executive Sercan Esen said the company’s commitment to the principle of privacy-by-design sets it apart from alternative computer vision products, helping to shield not only worker’s physical safety, but also their psychological safety. “Intenseye isn’t just a ‘nice to have,’” Esen said, adding that it’s “at the forefront of a long-overdue transformation that is empowering EHS leaders to more effectively and efficiently protect their frontline teams.”
The startup provides some impressive numbers to back up its claim that it’s an industry leader in workplace safety. It says it grew its global footprint by 125% in 2023 and has customers on six continents, including some of the world’s top insurers, cloud and EHS technology providers. Its customers stretch across more than 30 industries in 25 countries, allowing it to safeguard more than 100,000 workers across the world.
Enhancing safety at work is an especially interesting and helpful use case for AI, said Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller. “Progress in computer vision enables tangible safety benefits for workers, and it will be interesting to see how many accidents and injuries this technology is able to prevent,” he said. “It’s an extremely beneficial application and I can’t wait to see the first successful real-world implementations.”
Air Street Capital’s Nathan Benaich said he has backed the company from day one because it’s focused on solving a major real-world problem that’s hiding in plain sight, but still costs businesses hundreds of billions of dollars per year. “By building on top of existing but underutilized camera investments, Intenseye adds 24/7 safety intelligence that drives measurable change in the service of workforces worldwide,” he said.
Intenseye isn’t alone in using computer vision to try to enhance safety in the workplace. Last year, a startup called Compscience Insurance Services announced it had raised $10 million to grow an alternative product that uses AI-powered visual insights as an incentive for companies to lower their accident insurance costs. Customers that agree to install Compscience’s software are entitled to significant discounts on their insurance policies.
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