San Mateo, CA – TuMeke Ergonomics, a computer vision platform that automatically assesses injury risk in manufacturing facilities, has secured $2.5M in seed funding.
The round was led by the health-tech-focused GSR Ventures, with participation from OVO Fund, Tuesday Capital, OneValley Ventures, Reach Ventures, Pirque Ventures, and Metagrove Ventures, among others.
“TuMeke builds 3D models of a person from any video to screen movement and postures for ergonomic risk. The platform then offers guidance to make the job safer and reduce fatigue,” said Zach Noland, co-founder of TuMeke Ergonomics. “This fundraise enables us to further position TuMeke as the ultimate tool for safety teams, giving clear insight into sources of Musculoskeletal Disorder (MSD) injuries across the entire organization and helping individual employees operate at their best.”
The software is already extensively used by many of the world’s largest manufacturers and workers’ compensation insurance firms. Recent data from a TuMeke implementation at a Fortune 500 company’s distribution facility captured a 68 percent drop in musculoskeletal disorder injuries, previously their largest category of documented injuries.
TuMeke’s management team combines high tech with industry expertise, bringing backgrounds from Stanford, Google, and academia. Dr. Alan Hedge, TuMeke’s advising Chief Scientist and professor emeritus from Cornell University has over 40 years of experience in ergonomics and human factors. Dr. Hedge sees TuMeke’s computer vision offering as a true catalyst for injury prevention and productivity improvement in manufacturing.
“Due to limited resources and time, safety teams historically relied on past injury data, intuition, or eyeballing to determine what to prioritize. This led to less reliable decision-making,” described Dr. Hedge. “Now, with computer vision, the process for performing assessments is frictionless. It isn’t unreasonable to regularly assess every job using software like TuMeke and rely on well-informed multi-dimensional data to determine where to invest your resources to improve cost and safety outcomes.”
TuMeke aims to help safety professionals across the entire process: risk identification, risk mitigation, and training. After recording a task, the system automatically identifies noteworthy postures, the frequency of particular movements, and the duration postures are held. It then offers automatic recommendations on what parts of the job to prioritize and what should be considered for adjustment with estimates of risk reduction impact. With this latest fundraise, the company will be enhancing its models to account for even more variables in injury risk identification and expanding the sophistication of its recommendations.
“An organization’s approach to Occupational Health and Safety has a significant impact on every individual at the workplace. TuMeke is leveraging leading-edge technology to enable the implementation of rapidly scalable, standardized, and cost-effective Occupational Health solutions,” said Dr. Wei Li Tan, Partner at GSR Ventures.
“TuMeke’s transformational Occupational Health platform has already changed how many of the world’s largest enterprises, manufacturers, and workers’ compensation insurers approach workforce safety, health, and productivity,” adds Dr. Tan. “We look forward to continuing this partnership as TuMeke continues to enable access to world-class technologies that make the global workplace safer and healthier.”
Source: TuMeke