Cortado Ventures is thrilled to have invested in Safety Radar, an Oklahoma-based enterprise SaaS company focused on transforming safety monitoring across multiple industries starting with the energy sector. The company is part of the EIC Rose Rock Bridge Program and is headquartered in Tulsa, OK. Learn more about the company, our investment, and how this technology will improve the overall safety reporting, tracking, and training in hazardous industries.

The Context: Where is the hazard?

Every seven seconds, an American worker is injured on the job.[1] 4.7M individuals are injured annually, which has a direct impact the lives of frontline employees, retention, and company productivity. Every 1.5 hours, someone dies on an American job site. Human error is the root cause of 90% of workplace accidents.[2]

How are so many injuries and deaths still happening even when safety measures are constantly being improved? Many industries still utilize the traditional safety binder. That safety binder informs the workforce of any new safety procedures, method for reporting, and any other follow-up items. When there is a safety change or update, each facility under management needs to shuffle and move mountains of paper just to manage the updates, and much of this information remains siloed. It’s very difficult to determine whether risks have been addressed, and whether hazard leading indicators are trending better or worse. If you have worked in an oil field, a manufacturing facility, or a warehouse, you probably recall being shown the safety binder on the first day of orientation. The hard part is ensuring that each employee has read the new rules/guidelines and is prepared accordingly.

The current process of addressing safety risks is outdated in many industries where the traditional use of pen and paper is a trusted method for hazard reporting and management, but also requires a substantial amount of manual review. The paper-based method can lead to a backlog, which makes these companies more likely to miss real risks that could potentially result in workplace injuries. Companies with multiple locations and hundreds of workers experience these challenges every day. When there are tickets being submitted each day, often companies find themselves bottlenecked in their ability to review all the submissions. This causes delays in addressing critical issues and can result in dangerous workplace conditions not being addressed that could cause injury to employees.

The impact of this problem is two-fold: it impacts reputation and revenue, while also representing significant operational cost. With the rising trend of the “nuclear” and “thermonuclear” settlements for workplace safety events (meaning settlements that are both of high impact to reputation and operational cost) this problem is not just being felt at a corporate safety level but at the executive board.

Not the Complete Picture but there are Parts of the Picture

With growth in innovation there are companies who have recognized that safety risk reporting needs to become digitalized. There are a number of software products that have been created to aid in incident report submission, processing, and completion. Some of the products in the market collect key data such as employee time in/time out, inventory, etc., but those systems don’t currently speak to each other. So, the dashboard view that a safety risk manager is getting is not a true comprehensive reading of the facility.

Frequently the manager is piecemealing the information together and using his or her knowledge to determine how to prioritize the risks reported. Current tech solutions provide summaries of the data and offer trends. This unfortunately does not help managers in identifying what is currently happening on the jobsite, what hazards need to be addressed, and what insights can be generated from the company’s historical data.

Companies are only as good as their workforce. If there are workplace related injuries consistently being reported that likely is reducing the total workforce numbers on that jobsite. Employees are likely to share their experiences with family and friends, which could leave bad reputation for the firm. Companies should prioritize addressing safety concerns, and that starts with enabling facility managers to have a holistic view of their facility.

A Comprehensive Real-Time Solution

The Safety Radar team saw, experienced, and understood the problem that existed in hazard training, reporting, and evaluation. Of utmost importance was identifying the risks in real time. Safety Radar’s technology provides real time multi-factor analysis, allowing organizations to act quickly to address emerging risks to their people, environment, assets, and reputation.

Safety Radar’s technology integrates seamlessly with the current processes of a company. Companies are able to use their current reporting system or deploy Safety Radar’s incident and observation forms. The underlying AI analyzes information 24/7/365, and it’s trained on the company processes and procedures, historical records, industrial trade group information, and publicly available datasets. With these inputs, Safety Radar technology offers insights that are easy to understand and helpful for everyone on the jobsite. Once risks have been analyzed, insights populate in the dashboard so the team can take action to keep people alive and safe.

Think about a job that needed to be completed on a specific day, such as cleaning out an oil tank.

1. It is an early morning, there were no supervisors on site (no foreman, operations manager, etc. — this is one risk factor)

a. Safety Radar would know who was on site that day

2. The operations team may not know that tank cleaning can be very dangerous, but industry data and numbers tell a different story

a. Safety Radar would know the numbers from the company’s database

3. Almost everyone on the crew was fairly new to the company. They could have brought non-intrinsically safe devices, such as cellphones, into a hazardous environment.

a. The facility operator would have not realized that was very dangerous.

4. Red alert is sent to the safety manager dashboard via Safety Radar

a. If the safety manager had pulled up Safety Radar’s dashboard that morning, this site would have been a red alert, telling the safety manager that supervision of this site was high priority. This red alert would have been triggered due to the new team, the lack of a supervisor on site, and this particular task being dangerous.

b. A red alert to the safety manager would have led him to ensure that a supervisor was needing to be sent to the site.

5. No red alert sent to manager dashboard

a. The manager would not have known that there was no supervisor on site, and there was a tank cleaning happening that day. The manager would likely not have known that this all was happening unless an injury occurred and that lead to further research.

The Safety Radar platform enables companies to become proactive. As companies continue to grow it will become even more pertinent to have a clear picture of what is happening at each facility, what hazards have been reported, and which hazards to prioritize. Workforce safety is the true goal driving the Safety Radar Team to develop a product that will aid employers and employees.

Why Cortado Invested

1. Value Proposition — Safety Radar’s technology has a very clear and concise value proposition to customers by delivering a greatly enhanced reporting output, actionable safety interventions, and immediate assessment that will positively impact the customer’s worker well-being, public reputation, revenue, operational costs, and engagement with its employees. Early pilots have realized results of increased employee safety sentiment and increased reporting of safety items. One case study demonstrated a 4X reporting increase within the year.

2. Safety First Team — The founders and founding team have predominantly come from a military background. Their intent is to significantly reduce workplace injuries using advanced AI technology and their deep experience. The founding team is experienced in safety operations and have all personally felt the pain of both managing safety operations and the negative consequences of safety events. They are clearly passionate about addressing this problem in the military and corporate environments.

3. Customers — The customers that Safety Radar is targeting are the ones Cortado knows the best and have a great network within (heavy industries such as oil and gas, manufacturing, construction, etc.)

Looking Ahead

At Cortado Ventures, we are dedicated to supporting Oklahoma-based entrepreneurs, who aim to grow the ecosystem and create jobs. Safety Radar is working to bring about change within hazard reporting and safety management across multiple industries. Employees and employers are equally important, and this product was created with both in mind. When employers are empowered with the best tools to ensure jobsites are safe for their workforce, companies can thrive. Safety Radar is creating an impact on more than just the employees and the employers but also hundreds of thousands of families as well.

Cheers to innovation and growing Oklahoma!

About Cortado Ventures

Cortado Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in ambitious, growth-driven companies, backing a new generation of economic prosperity for the Midcontinent region, defined as Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico. As one of the largest VC funds in Oklahoma, Cortado’s focus is on tech companies bringing innovative solutions to the energy and logistics, life sciences, and the future of work sectors. For more information, visit cortado.ventures.