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Highlights

How Intenseye’s CEO Turned Factory Floor Experience into a $93M Safety Revolution

Every year, 2.4 million people lose their lives in workplace accidents. That’s 4% of global deaths—a staggering number that most of us never think about. For Sercan Esen, these aren’t just statistics; they’re the driving force behind Intenseye, a company using AI-powered computer vision to make industrial workplaces safer.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Sercan, CEO and Co-Founder of Intenseye, shared how his company has raised $93 million to transform workplace safety by creating technology that connects to existing cameras in manufacturing facilities to detect unsafe conditions in real-time.

From Software Engineer to Factory Worker

When most founders talk about understanding their customers, they mean conducting surveys or interviews. Sercan took a dramatically different approach.

“I visited personally over 50 facilities, first two years of our journey,” Sercan explains. “I made ice creams for a week, cars for another week. And I was working right next to frontline teams to learn more.”

This immersion wasn’t a marketing stunt—it was a necessity. Sercan and his co-founder were software engineers with zero manufacturing experience. They needed to understand the environment they were trying to improve from the inside.

The turning point came during a night shift at an ice cream factory. A shift manager told Sercan about a worker who had just lost his fingers in an accident.

“The moment you hear these stories, you just cannot continue,” Sercan recalls. “And our mind was racing to a solution how we can help.”

Building the First Solution

That’s when the idea for Intenseye crystallized: connect existing security cameras to AI that could detect safety violations in real-time and alert managers before accidents happen.

Their first prototype deployment delivered immediate results. “We sent these first notifications over a night shift. And it was like over 150 alerts,” Sercan explains. The shift managers were shocked by how many safety issues were happening undetected and immediately asked, “What else can you build?”

From there, Sercan and his team started mapping industrial hazards and translating them into AI models. Today, they run over 120 models covering 50+ out-of-the-box safety use cases, from missing personal protective equipment to unsafe material handling.

Creating a New Category

When explaining what Intenseye does, Sercan doesn’t place it within existing categories like EHS (Environmental Health and Safety) platforms. “We always said, we are category creating solutions,” he notes.

But he’s quick to distinguish meaningful category creation from marketing hype: “To me, what is the new category is are you inventing a new way of working? If you are making a way of working slightly better or maybe drastically better, I don’t think you’re inventing a category.”

What makes Intenseye different is that it fundamentally changes how safety is managed in industrial settings. Traditional EHS platforms operate on lagging indicators—they document what went wrong after an incident occurs. Intenseye provides real-time insights that prevent incidents before they happen.

“Think about that yearly cycle [of safety planning],” Sercan explains. “We make that in weeks and sometimes in days. Because we believe when it comes to safety, you cannot predict future with the past data.”

Account-Based Marketing Before They Knew Its Name

Intenseye’s go-to-market approach was as innovative as their product. Sercan recalled how he once “invented” what he later learned was account-based marketing (ABM).

“In our early days I thought I invented a new marketing motion and I was so excited and I walk into a board meeting,” Sercan laughs. “I said, ‘I invented a new marketing motion. Hear me out and this is amazing.’ And turns out I did not invent it. There’s a name for it, account-based marketing.”

His approach was deeply personal. When targeting a potential customer, Sercan would study everything about their facilities and safety challenges. Then he’d create personalized content that showed exactly how Intenseye could help:

“We built this video engine. I asked my co-founder, can you build a video engine for me that I can drag and drop a video and it analyzes with our AI without any interruption… We just genuinely generate an AI video that shows how our system can detect unsafe acts and conditions.”

After posting the video on LinkedIn and targeting the prospect’s region, “Couple hours later it was just a meeting booked from the VP of Healthcare Safety with a note that, ‘Hey, I’m really interested about this solution.'” Two months later, they were a customer.

Learning Enterprise Sales from Scratch

As first-time founders without enterprise sales experience, Sercan and his team initially misunderstood their own business model.

“We thought, okay, companies will connect their cameras by themselves and then they will add their rules. It’s self-serve and they will create these use cases by dragging and dropping… Maybe small payments we get.”

Sercan admits, “We were so wrong and we had no idea about enterprise sales.”

What saved them was humility. When faced with his first procurement negotiation, Sercan simply acknowledged his inexperience: “I remember my first call with the procurement leader and he was challenging me and I said, ‘Look, this is the first time I’m doing this. Can you tell me how you guys want to buy this? You tell me and I will just figure this out.'”

That procurement leader provided insights that helped shape Intenseye’s land-and-expand model, which now drives their growth as they scale from single-facility deployments to managing 100+ site implementations for Fortune 500 companies.

Building Trust with Frontline Workers

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of deploying computer vision in workplaces was addressing privacy concerns. When cameras start watching workers, resistance is natural.

“We are always aggressively cautious about the implementation of computer vision technology because immediate reaction might be, ‘Hey, this is a big brother,'” Sercan explains. Union leaders and frontline workers worried the technology might be used to monitor productivity or enforce punitive measures.

Intenseye’s solution was to design with privacy as a core feature: “We spend a lot of time with unions, frontline teams, how we can build anonymization around blurring the entire body and anonymization at the camera level, thumbnail level… to earn their trust, earn their hearts and minds at the frontline level.”

This approach—building technology that protected workers rather than surveilling them—helped overcome initial resistance and drove adoption.

The Road Ahead

Today, Intenseye continues to scale, with ambitious plans to triple their sales team and become the industry standard for workplace safety. They’re developing edge deployment options to handle bandwidth-limited facilities and expanding their platform to protect more workers worldwide.

Sercan’s vision is clear: “We want to be industrial standard and we want people to say three, ten years from now, ‘What were we doing without Intenseye?'”

For B2B founders, Intenseye’s journey offers powerful lessons about customer immersion, category creation, and the importance of adapting your go-to-market approach based on real customer feedback rather than assumptions. Sometimes, the path to protecting millions starts with making ice cream on the factory floor.