Welcome, Protex AI!
AI-powered workplace safety.
- Founders: Dan Hobbs, Ciarán O’Mara
- Location: Dublin, Ireland
- Industry: Artificial Intelligence
The Opportunity
Worker safety is a critical challenge in industrial environments with significant human and financial costs. Despite advances in technology, most manufacturing and logistics sites still rely on reactive, manual safety processes that fail to prevent incidents before they occur.
The limitations of traditional workplace safety approaches are evident in the data: 2.4% of U.S. workers experience recordable safety incidents every year, and approximately 5,200 workplace fatalities occurred in the U.S. in 2023. Reliance on manual checks leads to subjective reporting of unsafe behaviors and under-reporting of incidents. Experts estimate that the actual number of incidents may be up to 3.2x higher than what is reported to OSHA. Due to its potentially hazardous nature, worker safety is the #1 priority of an industrial site. Budgets for worker safety can be up to 5% of site operating expenses across staff, training, and technology.
Beyond the human toll, workplace incidents can carry devastating financial consequences for employers. The average cost per safety incident can stretch into the tens of thousands of dollars, and in severe cases, can escalate into millions. These expenses encompass compensation for lost time, medical costs, legal fees, regulatory compliance, and potential fines. The most tragic cases make headlines, posing deep reputational risk. Yet despite the tragic cost of these incidents, they have remained stubbornly high over the last 15 years [even while technology has been brought to bear in other industrial processes such as vehicle telematics]. There is a clear and urgent need for more proactive, technology-driven solutions that can prevent incidents before they occur. This is where Protex AI comes in.
The Solution
Protex AI is revolutionizing workplace safety by transforming existing camera infrastructure into an intelligent, AI-powered monitoring system that proactively prevents workplace incidents. Using advanced computer vision and deep learning, Protex AI’s platform continuously scans industrial environments to detect unsafe events and behaviors in real-time, enabling teams to intervene before accidents can occur. At the heart of their solution is a proprietary, customizable rules engine that allows companies to define and enforce specific safety protocols through an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface.
What sets Protex AI apart is their team’s unwavering commitment to privacy for both enterprises and workers. On one hand, the platform leverages edge computing to process video feeds on-premise, addressing a critical concern for industrial enterprise clients. On the other hand, robust privacy safeguards to protect workers themselves are built directly into the system, including automatic body and face blurring, and options to remove timestamp data to prevent shift-specific tracking. These features ensure that the technology improves safety without compromising worker privacy or trust.
The platform’s impact is measurable and profound. After implementing Protex AI, Fortune 500 enterprises like DHL are achieving measurable safety improvements, including an average 64% reduction in risk within just three months of deployment. These tangible results translate directly to customer ROI through reduced injury rates, decreased medical and legal costs, lower insurance premiums, and lower regulatory fines.
By leveraging edge computing and strong privacy safeguards, Protex AI has created an enterpirse solution that not only improves safety but also builds trust workers through transparent, non-invasive monitoring.
Why We’re Backing Protex AI
Protex AI is capitalizing on a pivotal moment in technological advancement where computer vision and edge computing have matured to where meaningful, real-time safety insights can now be extracted from existing camera infrastructure without specialized hardware.
The maturity of computer vision is a critical step to bringing AI to industrial sites. Traditional IOT sensors allow only one sensor to monitor one object and can only detect metrics depending on what’s pre-built in the hardware. For instance, a sensor with a thermometer can detect the monitored object’s temperature or a speedometer can detect object speed — the data that it collects is hardware defined. But computer vision is a one-to-many technology and is software-defined, meaning a single camera can detect hundreds of datapoints such as speed, position, human-machine interactions, on/off, etc. through vision alone. The camera also has a “god’s eye” view so it can monitor many objects at once, rather than just the object it’s attached to. Finally, computer vision’s capabilities are defined by its software; its outputs can be improved without changing the underlying camera hardware.
Protex AI leverages breakthroughs in computer vision with a growing awareness of AI’s potential in industrial settings. Industrial and logistics players have been primed to embrace more AI in their processes by the success of vehicle telematics for both safety and efficiency use cases. Today, ~40% of all commercial vehicles have telematics solutions installed —double the rate 10 years ago. We believe Protex’s technology will enable similar shifts on industrial and logistics sites.
Beyond their technology, we believe deeply in the Protex AI team and their ability.. Dan Hobbs and Ciarán O’Mara represent a rare combination of mission-driven passion and commercial and technical excellence. The company’s origins are tied to a tragedy at an industrial plant that affected a family member and highlighted the critical need for better safety technologies. —Ciarán’s specialized expertise in computer vision coupled with Dan’s exceptional commercial leadership should aid Protex in in their mission to transform an entire industry’s approach to worker safety. Protex’s ability to attract blue-chip customers, win global RfPs, and consistently see high ROI on the product further validates the market opportunity. In short, we see Protex addressing a large greenfield market and consistently beating competitors head-to-head thanks to their edge computing capabilities, accuracy in incident identification, and superior customer experience.
What’s Ahead
Protex AI is more than just a safety platform — it’s a unified system of intelligence for industrial operations. By integrating computer vision and AI, the Protex team is positioning themselves to become the safety and operational optimization platform for industrial sites.
As the market for safety continues to evolve, we believe Protex AI is uniquely positioned to lead the transformation, making workplaces safer, more efficient, and more intelligent. We’re proud to partner with Dan, Ciarán, and the entire Protex team on this critical mission.
And we’re pleased to be backing Protex AI alongside our friends at Hedosophia, Notion Capital, Firstminute, Elkstone and Playfair Capital.
Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, Protex AI!
Related Articles
