Workplace injuries and illnesses cost the U.S. upwards of $250 billion each year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. ERA-backed startup Intenseye, a machine learning platform, has raised a $4 million seed round to try to bring that number way down in an economic and efficient way.
The round was co-led by Point Nine and Air Street Capital, with participation by angel investors from Twitter, Cortex, Fastly, and Even Financial.
Intenseye integrates with existing network-connected cameras within facilities and then uses computer vision to monitor employee health and safety on the job. This means that Intenseye can identify health and safety violations, from not wearing a hard hat to ignoring social distancing protocols and everything in between, in real time.
The service’s dashboard incorporates federal and local workplace safety laws, as well as an individual organization’s rules to monitor worker safety in real time. All told, the Intenseye platform can identify 30 different unsafe behaviors which are common within workplaces. Managers can further customize these rules using a drag-and-drop interface.
When a violation occurs and is spotted, employee health and safety professionals receive an alert immediately, by text or email, to resolve the issue.
Intenseye also takes the aggregate of workplace safety compliance within a facility to generate a compliance score and diagnose problem areas.
The company charges a base deployment fee and then on an annual fee based on the number of cameras the facility wants to use as Intenseye monitoring points.
Cofounder Sercan Esen says that one of the greatest challenges of the business is a technical one: Intenseye monitors workplace safety through computer vision to send EHS (employee health and safety) violation alerts but it also never analyzes faces or identifies individuals, and all video is destroyed on the fly and never stored with Intenseye.
The Intenseye team is made up of 20 people.
“Today, our team at Intenseye is 20% female and 80% male and includes 4 nationalities,” said Esen. “We have teammates with MSs in computer science and teammates who have graduated from high school.”
Diversity and inclusion among the team is critical at every company, but is particularly important at a company that builds computer vision software.
The company has moved to remote work in the wake of the pandemic and is using VR to build a virtual office and connect workers in a way that’s more immersive than Zoom.
Intenseye is currently deployed across 30 cities and will use the funding to build out the team, particularly in the sales and marketing departments, and deploy go-to-market strategies.
