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Industrial safetytech funding reached a document excessive of $100m in 2021, and stays considerably forward of pre-pandemic funding ranges regardless of a dip in 2022
By
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Sebastian Klovig Skelton,
Senior reporter
Published: 28 Feb 2023 18:00
Startups working with synthetic intelligence (AI), knowledge analytics, robotics and different rising applied sciences to enhance security and danger administration in industrial workplaces have secured greater than £150m in funding since 2020, in accordance with the Safetytech Accelerator.
According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), greater than 100 persons are killed every year within the UK because of office accidents, whereas over 500,000 maintain non-fatal accidents. An additional 1.8 million folks endure from diseases brought on or aggravated by work. Overall, it notes that the price of workplace-related accidents and diseases to the UK financial system quantities to greater than £18bn a 12 months.
Established by Lloyd’s Register and the Lloyd’s Register Foundation as a non-profit to advertise wider adoption of safety-related applied sciences, the Safetytech Accelerator has performed a mapping train of the UK’s security expertise startups working to enhance security and danger administration in industrial workplaces.
It discovered that safetytech startups working in AI (£60m), knowledge analytics (£51m), and sensors and wearables (£27m) have attracted probably the most funding since 2018, and that funding between 2021 and 2022 was 3 times larger than funding between 2018 and 2019.
It added that safetytech funding reached a document excessive of £100m in 2021, earlier than falling again to £48m in 2022. However, it famous this funding was nonetheless considerably forward of pre-pandemic ranges.
“While the wide range of technologies make this a difficult area to measure, our initial findings show investors are starting to see the potential of industrial safetytech,” stated Maurizio Pilu, managing director of the accelerator.
“It is encouraging to see that buyers and industrial firms are supporting the event and deployment of applied sciences that would increase security, effectivity and assist environmental, social, and governance initiatives.
“Through our discussions with clients and technology companies, there is anecdotal evidence that the pandemic has made companies reassess the importance of worker welfare and how to keep operations safe and resilient with fewer people on site. This has led to new approaches to safety and risk management, in particular using technology, and may have led to more interest in safetytech across industry. We hope this trend is here to stay.”
A wider evaluation of the UK safetytech sector performed in August 2022 by Perspective Economics on behalf of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) – which included evaluation of companies engaged on safety-related points outdoors of particularly industrial workplaces – discovered that safetytech is now one of many fastest-growing technologoy sub- sectors, with vital jumps in income, funding and employment.
The Safetytech Acceletror is at the moment working with HSE on its Discovering Safety initiative, which was set as much as discover how higher tech and regulation can enhance security and danger administration in industrial workplaces.
As a part of this initiative, HSE and the Safetytech Accelerator are searching for to ascertain an Industrial Safetytech Regulatory Sandbox, which is able to initially give attention to innovation round vital areas of danger in development – together with falls from top, car collisions, crane operations and guide dealing with.
Regulatory sandboxes, equivalent to these being developed by the UK’s info commissioner, are check environments that permit software program to be trialled in real-life conditions beneath the shut supervision of regulators or different oversight our bodies.
Set to being in April 2023, the sandbox will even discover methods to evaluate danger and guarantee more practical regulatory compliance, assist speed up the adoption of confirmed security tech merchandise, and work to know and cut back limitations that may delay the deployment of latest security applied sciences.
Helen Balmforth, head of knowledge analytics at HSE and lead for the Discovering Safety venture, beforehand instructed Computer Weekly there are nonetheless a variety of limitations to extra widespread safetytech adoption, together with monetary ones for smaller firms that won’t have the sources to buy new applied sciences; a lack of expertise about what some applied sciences can do and the way they are often successfully carried out in a enterprise; and “considerations around the workforce, and the ethics of potentially monitoring people and collecting information as they’re working”.
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