SafetyCulture backs video analytics startup in $8 million series A

Video analytics platform Unleash live has raised $8 million in a series A round led by tech unicorn SafetyCulture.

The five-year-old tech startup’s ‘Intelligent Remote Vision’ enables companies to improve productivity and safety, as well as reducing costs by using real-time video analytics to transform visual inspections.

Roger Allen’s Patagorang Investment Group was among the series A investors.

Unleash live will use funding to build its A.I. apps store, and expand its US team. The raise tops up a $475,000 federal government grant awarded earlier this year

SafetyCulture CEO and founder Luke Anear will join the board.

The Unleash app store currently has 34 apps, with that figure expected to top 200 within two eyes.

The cloud-based platform lets customers connect existing visual monitoring such as CCTV, IP cameras, drones and smartphones to it and stream their video for AI analysis. The range of uses includes solar PV and power line fault detection, traffic and public transport analytics. The AI analytics augmens the role of inspectors, progress monitors, financiers, auditors, and regulators.

Customers subscribe to a tiered subscription model, based on live streaming, secure storage, and AI apps modules. The company counts multiple US city authorities, as well as Transport for NSW and BHP among its clients.

Hanno Blankenstein and Jason Grier co-founded Unleash live in 2016 and have grown the business by more than 500% since March 2020. Earlier this year the business hit 25 million minutes of video analysed.

“The market has validated our approach; we’ve been growing rapidly for some time and this investment will allow us to reach new geographies and introduce our platform to more industries,” Blankenstein said.

“We’re excited to welcome the combined expertise of SafetyCulture and Roger Allen, which will drive the continued success of Unleash live and help take us to the next level.”

Blankenstein said the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to the company’s success.

“A growing number of businesses now use Unleash live to overcome  the challenges of maintaining distributed assets and to keep employees out of harm’s way,” he said.

“Remote monitoring and machine learning assisted inspections will remain critical when the pandemic ends because so many organisations have realised there is a significant opportunity to improve how they operate. They will continue to apply these learnings and look for new ways to build them into their business.”

SafetyCulture’s Luke Anear said Unleash live applied innovative new thinking in response to old challenge

“We recognise the potential of leveraging camera feeds to trigger safer, smarter actions. A.I. video analytics is an enormously powerful data source for an operations platform like ours, and one that many of our customers can benefit from,” he said.

“Unleash live has shown extraordinary growth during the past year. I’m eager to help them support more organisations to be better, faster and more reliable.”

Roger Allen said Unleash live is well on its way to becoming a big name in the Australian technology landscape and I am excited to join this journey.”