Workplace safety is a critical crisis: In 2021, 5,190 workers died and 3.2 million suffered work-related injuries in the US, but taking into account underreporting, the actual number could be as high as 8.1 million. It’s not just a health problem, the economic impact of injuries and illnesses is estimated at $174-$348 billion annually in the US alone. Regulation has attempted to address this with OSHA (US) coming into play in 1970 and HSWA (UK) in 1974. These require employers to offer employees workplaces that do not have serious hazards and to identify and rectify health and safety issues. Despite this, the problem persists, causing massive production losses, liability costs, and employee turnover. Employee turnover contributes to a vicious cycle of undertrained employees who are more at risk of health and safety incidents that may then cause them to leave the workplace due to lack of care and protection.

We see a range of approaches to solve this challenge broadly split across training, tooling to encourage compliance with safe processes, and hazard detection to uncover blind spots. Whilst training is fundamental and there are innovative technological solutions to deliver this training that take into account the nuances of frontline activity, here we focus on the tools that aid compliance and detection of unsafe practices.

Historically, the market has relied on EHS suites that require individuals to self-report incidents or non-compliance. Although outdated and reliant on individuals and managers to report, potentially even despite their own interests, these have become the backbone and source of truth for organisations driving change and investment to improve workplace safety. As such, we are most excited about companies that, at least initially, can supercharge those solutions.

The first set of companies help to remove the need for employees to remember every single detail of a safe process by providing digital checklists that remind employees of what is required. They then also ease any manual work associated with collecting and analysing the data to drive insights. They do assume that the process that is set in place is the best process and they cannot adapt automatically to changes in an environment that might mean there is a better process.

The second set of companies we are excited about are those that uncover blindspots in an organisation. Even with the best will in the world, it’s impossible to track every ‘near miss’ precisely because it was a miss and therefore, to the human eye, didn’t happen. Solutions like Protex, Intenseye and Voxel are using computer vision to capture these near misses allowing companies to better train or change processes to avoid the miss ever becoming a hit.

As with many companies tackling the worlds of manufacturing, production, and logistics, there are two main ways to enter a company - at the local site level or at the corporate level. Although the site approach might be faster initially, it doesn’t help expanding from site to site. On the other hand, the corporate approach might take longer initially but then can help accelerate the site-to-site jump. Having said that, gaining love on the frontline, with or without a corporate-level contract, is essential to success.