Dan Hobbs had already founded and sold his first company, which made software to prevent students from cheating, when he learned of a tragedy that would inspire his next. Childhood friend Ciaran O’Mara, a computer vision expert, told Hobbs that a worker had suddenly died at the warehouse where his aunt worked as an operations manager in their native Ireland.
“They thought it was a freak accident,” Hobbs told Forbes. “But when they went back through the CCTV, they saw that the behavior patterns that were leading to an accident were happening all the time. So it could have been stopped.”
Two years later, Hobbs and O’Mara founded Protex AI, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to monitor worker safety at warehouses and factories by analyzing security video footage. On Tuesday, the Dublin-based company announced a $36 million Series B from investors Salesforce Ventures and Hedosophia.
Protex’s services detect behavior and patterns that could lead to an accident, like workers failing to wear protective gear like hardhats or safety goggles, reckless forklift operations or roughhousing while on site. The software lets operations managers use generative AI to sift through warehouse data or create aggregated safety reports. The product can blur faces to protect the identity of individual workers, so companies can focus on overall safety trends instead of singling out workers.
The advantage, said Hobbs, is being able to get a more complete picture of safety practices that site managers miss amid the chaotic environment of a warehouse. “They’re humongous. Lots of noise. There’s lots of stuff going on,” said Hobbs. “So it’s really hard to actually spot these trends if you’re just walking around a facility.”
The company is still small — annualized revenue is expected to hit $10 million by the end of the year, and the new funding brings Protex’s valuation to $150 million — but it’s already snagged high-profile customers like Amazon and Tesla. (The company declined to detail how the companies are using Protex’s products, citing non-disclosure agreements.)
The opportunity is potentially huge. The global warehouse and storage market is expected to grow to $643 billion in the next four years, according to the research firm Technavio. Meanwhile, worker safety has become a hot-button issue as companies like Amazon expand their footprint in the U.S. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the transportation and warehousing sector had 930 fatalities in 2023 (though that figure also includes car accidents involving delivery drivers) — second only to the construction industry.
Part of the benefit of using a system like Protex’s is saving on insurance, said Nowi Kallen, managing director at Salesforce Ventures. “There’s a real cost to not doing anything for prevention,” he said. “Insurance premiums are going up year over year. It’s a huge cost to these businesses, and this is a way to actually keep premiums down.”
Technology for warehouses and factories has come under scrutiny, though, as privacy activists argue the tools can be overly intrusive when it comes to surveillance. Hobbs said Protex homes in on safety, not performance. “We’re not coming in saying you have to work faster, better, smarter,” said Hobbs. “It’s not one individual that’s going to cause a freak accident. There’s these collective pieces to it, and that’s really what we focus on.”
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