TuMeke Ergonomics, a Californian computer vision platform, has secured $2.5M in seed funding. The investment round was led by the health-tech-focused GSR Ventures (which invested in Gunzilla Games and Sweat Economy), with participation from OVO Fund, OneValley Ventures, Reach Ventures, Pirque Ventures, and Metagrove Ventures, among others.
How will it use funds?
With this latest fundraise, the TuMeke Ergonomics will enhance its models to account for even more variables in injury risk identification and expand the sophistication of its recommendations.
“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.”
“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. Alan Hedge, TuMeke’s advising Chief Scientist. “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.”
Dr Wei Li Tan, Partner at GSR Ventures said, “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. 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.”
AI safety technology platform
Founded by Diwakar Ganesan, Riley Noland, and Zach Noland in 2019, TuMeke Ergonomics is a computer vision platform that automatically assesses injury risk in manufacturing facilities. It provides solutions to extract 3D joint positions from 2D cameras to automate ergonomic risk evaluations.
It offers a web app that allows team members to collaborate across different locations, get automatic recommendations on postures for investigation and a dashboard to track performance over time.
TuMeke aims to help safety professionals across processes such as 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 offers automatic recommendations on what parts of the job to prioritise and what should be considered for adjustment with estimates of risk reduction impact.
The software is extensively used by many of the world’s largest manufacturers and workers’ compensation insurance firms. As per recent data from a TuMeke implementation at a Fortune 500 company’s distribution facility, there has been a 68% drop in musculoskeletal disorder injuries, previously their largest category of documented injuries.
