(Bloomberg) -- Intenseye has raised $64 million in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to develop AI that can detect and help fix potential hazards in the workplace, an effort it says can help save lives and reduce economic losses from millions of accidents every year.

The New York-headquartered startup’s latest financing, in which existing backers Insight Partners, Point Nine and Air Street Capital also took part, takes its total funding to about $90 million to date.

Founded in 2018 by Turkish-born duo Sercan Esen and Serhat Cillidag, Intenseye’s technology works through existing cameras within warehouses or factories, identifying problems for clients from Heineken NV to bottler Swire Coca-Cola Ltd. that manual inspections might miss. The pair, who met while working at Sony, are working on systems that, for instance, can detect whether  workers are in protective gear, scan and identify hazardous areas, and monitor the speed of vehicles such as forklifts. Intensye cites International Labor Organization estimates that nearly 3 million work-related deaths are reported each year, while losses to the global economy from workplace absences is a staggering $3 trillion. 

Intenseye employs computer vision, a field of AI in which computers observe and make sense of images and video, to help pinpoint 36 million unsafe acts and conditions for customers across 25 countries in 2023. It does that without compromising on employee privacy, Esen said.

"We anonymize the data and our systems do not recognize workers' faces," said Esen, the startup’s chief executive officer. To guarantee that anonymity, it strips personally identifiable information from all video captured. “We are bringing in generative AI video to create virtual persona, and recreate spaces and context to further boost anonymization.”

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