🚨Investment Alert: TuMeke
Company: TuMeke
About: A computer vision and 3D modeling platform that eliminates injuries and maximizes the productivity of industrial workers.
Stage: Seed
Location: United States (California)
Founders: Diwakar Ganesan, Zach Noland, Riley Noland
Co-investors: OVO Fund, GSR Ventures, Pirque Ventures, Tuesday Capital, OneValley Ventures, Reach Ventures
According to the National Safety Council (NSC), a worker is injured on the job every seven seconds. This is a pervasive problem that currently exists across a number of industries ranging from healthcare, logistics, food and beverage services, construction, manufacturing, and retail trades. For this reason, every year, millions of dollars are claimed under workers’ compensation leading to significant hardships for both the employees and the employers across these sectors.
Here’s the thing; this type of industrial workplace ergonomics is an area that has been left untouched until now. For several decades, the technology available to analyze, monitor, detect, and project workers’ poses have not yet been known to effectively do this at scale and cost. Traditionally, manual safety experts were hired to conduct the analyses and report on behalf of the corporation. This process was slow, tedious, and expensive. Therefore, you can well imagine how restrictive this would be for companies employing several thousands of workers and the associated costs.
Enter TuMeke
We’re now starting to see the emergence of technology enablers like computer vision and machine learning provide opportunities that can augment and disrupt these archaic processes with the benefits of scale, improved accuracy, and cost reduction.
TuMeke is doing precisely this — a computer vision and 3D modeling platform that eliminates injuries and maximizes the productivity of industrial workers.
The team at TuMeke got connected with us because they knew how well we aligned with each other in helping disrupt the future of industry through technology. Two of the co-founders; Zach and Riley (brothers) grew up in a family working in manufacturing in the Central Valley of California and witnessed first-hand the impact debilitating injuries could have on their family members, identifying from a young age that an unsafe job is also an unproductive job. This set them on a course that took them to Stanford and Google which ultimately led them to partner with fellow Stanford alumnus; Diwakar (CTO) to build out their company in just over a year.
The team is now focused on building detailed 3D models of the human body moving through space from standard video — taken by mobile app or uploaded via their web-based platform. The system then completes industry-standard assessments to estimate risks with a standard methodology to prioritize interventions to proactively prevent future injury.
After the video is uploaded, the software automatically determines the suggested postures/poses for the job, the frequency of particular movements, and even the duration of poses that should be held. Recommendations are then provided on which postures in the job are recommended and what parts of the body should be considered for adjustment with of risk of reduction impact.
One particular case study with one of their clients; a Fortune 500 company with distribution centers had hundreds of workers performing a variety of different manual handling tasks. Safety staff was seeing ergonomic-related injuries as representing the largest portion of their recorded incidents and wanted to find a more efficient way to assess the risk of such injuries developing and quickly identify what can be changed in advance.
This distribution center then observed a 68% decrease in recorded Muscoskeleteal Disorder injuries within 6-months of deploying TuMeke. Moreover, safety staff also shared they felt more empowered and found the platform led to more healthy collaborations between safety teams and line workers.
The Future
It should be made clear that TuMeke was never designed to replace safety teams and their experts. Instead, the platform supplements and enhances these important members to better support them in their analyses with the help of speed, optimization, and cost efficiency — a force multiplier.
We’re now seeing a world where technology and human capital are working together to better help improve livelihoods and minimize the probability of injury for workers across a number of industries at scale.
Especially now as we begin to see the world come back to a level of normalcy, the supply chain, logistics, and manufacturing sectors will again be inundated with strong demand and there’ll be a need for workers to help with this effort. It’s good to know TuMeke will be ready and available to support this transition.
Metagrove Ventures is an early-stage investment venture capital fund, focused on supporting founders and companies who are building the future of industry by creating inflection points in the market.
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