A New York computer-vision company turning the cameras a factory already owns into a 24/7 safety system - spotting the hazard before it becomes an injury.
Every factory has cameras. Most of them record footage no one ever watches - a passive archive consulted only after something has already gone wrong. Intenseye was built on the observation that this is backwards. The most valuable moment for a safety camera is not after an accident, but in the seconds before one.
Founded in 2018 by Sercan Esen and Serhat Cillidag, Intenseye connects to a facility's existing CCTV network and runs computer-vision models across the feeds in real time. It looks for the small, ordinary precursors to serious injury: a worker without a hard hat, a person standing in a forklift's path, a blocked fire exit, a spill left on the floor, someone bending in a way that will eventually wreck their back.
When the system sees one of these, it does not file a report for next month's audit. It alerts the safety team on the spot, logs the event, and can route a corrective task to the right person - closing the loop while the hazard is still a hazard and not yet a headline.
The scale is the point. The platform tracks more than 45 distinct EHS use cases and processes roughly 22 billion video frames a day, work no human safety officer could do across a single shift, let alone continuously. Intenseye today reports protecting more than 100,000 workers across 25-plus countries.
The motivation behind the numbers is blunt. Esen often cites the figure that roughly 2.4 million people die from work-related causes each year, and that the overwhelming majority of those incidents were preventable. Intenseye's wager is that prevention is largely a visibility problem - you cannot fix the near-miss you never saw.
Before Intenseye, Sercan Esen was an AI consultant at Sony, working on global machine-learning initiatives, with degrees in computer science and management information systems from Bogazici University in Istanbul. But the company's real founding research happened on factory floors, not in a lab.
In the first two years, Esen visited more than 50 manufacturing sites and worked the lines himself - a week making ice cream, another week building cars - to see why safety rules written in a boardroom keep failing the people meant to follow them.
That immersion produced Intenseye's core thesis: safety breaks in the gap between the rule and the reality of how work is actually done. Software that can see that gap continuously is worth more than any monthly clipboard audit.
The core computer-vision engine plugs into existing cameras and detects 45+ EHS scenarios - PPE, work-at-height, forklift/pedestrian proximity, blocked exits, housekeeping and ergonomic risk - with people anonymized by design.
Instant notifications to floor and EHS teams, plus built-in task management to assign, track and close out corrective actions the moment a hazard is detected.
Dashboards, risk heatmaps, safety scores and trend forecasting that carry safety data from the plant floor up to the boardroom.
Purpose-built edge units - Core, Traffic, Thermal, Speaker, Solar, Depth and Hub - extending coverage to sites without cameras or wiring, including thermal, 3D-depth and solar-powered off-grid options.
On-site speakers deliver instant audio warnings to interrupt an unsafe act before it escalates - not just a log entry, but an intervention.
Post-Series B, Intenseye is layering large language models and mobile support onto the platform to broaden use cases and put safety insight in a pocket.
Industrial safety is enormous, under-digitized and rarely fashionable - exactly the kind of market that rewards patience. Intenseye's investors, including Lightspeed, Insight Partners, Point Nine and Air Street Capital, have now put more than $90 million behind that bet.
Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners · reported ~$300M valuation (Forbes, unconfirmed by company)
Customers are large industrial enterprises across manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, food & beverage, automotive, chemicals and air cargo. Reported deployments include Heineken, Unilever, Siemens, Swire Coca-Cola, Cathay Cargo, JTI, Huhtamaki, Coats, Nexans, Haier and Koctas.
Where competitors like Protex AI, Voxel and Everguard chase the same computer-vision opportunity, Intenseye leans on three choices:
Sercan Esen and Serhat Cillidag launch the company to apply computer vision to workplace safety.
The founders visit 50+ facilities and work production lines to learn how safety protocols fail in practice.
Point Nine and Air Street back the seed; Insight Partners leads the Series A as enterprises roll out the platform.
Forbes reports Intenseye raising from Lightspeed at around a $300M valuation as deployments expand globally.
Lightspeed leads the largest-ever safety-AI round; Intenseye launches Sentinel devices and adds LLM and mobile features.
Interviews and demos covering how the platform works and why Esen built it.
It connects to a facility's existing security cameras and uses computer vision to detect unsafe acts and conditions in real time - missing PPE, blocked exits, forklift near-misses - so safety teams can prevent injuries before they happen.
It was founded in 2018 by Sercan Esen (CEO) and Serhat Cillidag (CTO). Esen previously worked as an AI consultant at Sony.
Over $90 million total - a $4M seed, a $25M Series A led by Insight Partners, and a record $64M Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2024.
The platform anonymizes the people it detects, tracking hazards and behaviors rather than identifying individuals. The company states it takes both safety and employee privacy seriously.
Large industrial and manufacturing enterprises - reportedly including Heineken, Unilever, Siemens, Swire Coca-Cola and Cathay Cargo - protecting more than 100,000 workers across 25+ countries.