Industrial Workplace Safety Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Tl;dr: We’re building software that monitors existing cameras in the port, logistics, and manufacturing industries to ensure compliance and identify safety issues. At Protex AI, we’re on a mission to protect the industrial workforce! We’re building a proactive computer vision tool for workplace safety - empowering industrial Health and Safety (HS) teams to identify risk and danger before it becomes a problem. 🤕 The Problem: Keeping people safe at work is extremely hard. In the U.S. alone, there were over 5,000 deaths in the workplace in 2019, mainly in the heavy industry space. Serious workplace injuries cost U.S. businesses circa $62 Billion annually. Until now, safety has been reactive, someone has to get injured, and in some cases fatally before something is done about it. ✅ Problem Solved: Protex AI’s platform uses privacy-preserving camera monitoring software to provide companies with an always-on guardian angel, protecting their workforce. The platform plugs into existing CCTV infrastructure and enables HS teams to flexibly translate their document-based safety rules into the real world. Protex AI takes these rules and autonomously audits the customer’s facility to identify areas of high risk and non-compliance. HS teams can access this data via a reporting engine and use it in weekly safety meetings, external safety audits, insurance discussions, and legal claims. The tool integrates seamlessly with existing safety workflows to augment data produced by any manual incident logging system in place.

We are a sensor company that aims to accurately capture the behavior of high throughput fluid systems. With this information we can help improve operations while reducing spills and theft. This technology could change the way the oil and gas industry, water municipalities, and anyone dealing with high volume fluid, operates. Fleets of our proprietary lightweight hardware send raw ultrasonic data directly to our server via cellular/satellite; we then use a mix of physics equations, signal processing, and anomaly detection to determine the behavior of fluid (volume and speed) in pipes.

WorkClout is enabling industrial labor to perform to their highest potential. WorkClout is a tool that helps industrial Operations & HR Teams make better decisions to improve production efficiency. WorkClout's SaaS tool centralizes on-the-job employee training, troubleshooting, safety/quality procedures, knowledge building, and performance tracking.