Protex AI is a Limerick, Ireland startup using computer vision AI to prevent warehouse injuries — with Amazon, Tesla and DHL

Every year, thousands of workers are injured in warehouses, factories, and industrial facilities. In the United States alone, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 5,486 fatal workplace injuries in 2022 — a 5.7% increase from the previous year — with logistics and warehousing among the highest-risk sectors. In Ireland, the Health and Safety Authority (HSA) tracks workplace fatalities annually, with manufacturing, construction, and agriculture consistently among the highest-risk sectors. Traditional safety management relies on human observation, manual audits, and retrospective incident reports. By the time a safety manager identifies a pattern of unsafe behaviour, someone has usually already been hurt.

Protex AI was founded on the premise that this does not have to be the case. The company builds AI-powered computer vision systems that plug into a facility’s existing CCTV infrastructure and monitor safety compliance continuously — detecting unsafe behaviours as they happen, not after an incident has occurred. The system does not replace safety managers. It gives them an always-on set of eyes across an entire facility, every shift, every hour, without fatigue.

DHL x Protex AI — Computer Vision AI Health & Safety Proof of Concept (2023)

The Origin Story — Two Founders, One Preventable Accident

Dan Hobbs and Ciarán O’Mara first met at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition when they were both 12 years old. They stayed in contact for years without founding a company together. Hobbs went on to graduate from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in Business, Economics and Social Studies in 2017, then founded Better Examinations — an online exam management and proctoring platform for third-level institutions. O’Mara, who is from Ahane in County Limerick and was educated at Castletroy College, studied Electronic and Computer Engineering at the University of Limerick before completing a PhD in Computer Vision Privacy.

The idea for Protex AI came out of a conversation at the Annual Young Scientist Awards Alumni Reunion. O’Mara was deep in his computer vision research. Hobbs had just exited his previous startup. The company’s origin story is tied to a specific incident: a close family member — an operations manager at a Fortune 500 company — spoke about a fatality that occurred on site. When CCTV footage was reviewed after the accident, what appeared to be a freak incident turned out to be the result of months of repetitive non-compliant behaviour that had gone undetected. As Hobbs later told Silicon Republic: “Freak accidents aren’t so freakish.”

They founded Protex AI in 2021, opening their first office in Limerick, Ireland. The company later moved to Dogpatch Labs in Dublin and now maintains its headquarters at 3 Castle Street, Dublin. Ciarán O’Mara has remained Limerick’s strongest tech advocate — Dan Hobbs told the Forbes Under 30 Forum in Limerick that engineers from the city, many of them University of Limerick graduates, are “probably the best in the country by far.”

They founded Protex AI in 2021. In 2023, both founders were named on the Forbes Europe 30 Under 30 list for Technology — one of the most competitive recognition programmes in European startups. The company has grown from a two-person founding team to between 51 and 100 employees with operations across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.

What Does Protex AI Actually Do?

The core problem Protex AI solves is straightforward: most industrial facilities already have extensive CCTV coverage, but that footage is only reviewed after something goes wrong. Human safety managers cannot watch every camera feed simultaneously. Incidents happen, footage is reviewed, reports are written — and the cycle repeats. Protex AI changes the model from reactive to proactive.

The Protex AI platform connects to a facility’s existing CCTV infrastructure through a plug-and-play vision processing device. No new cameras need to be installed. The system analyses live video feeds continuously using computer vision and machine learning algorithms — detecting unsafe behaviours and environmental hazards as they occur and generating alerts in real time, without requiring human intervention to trigger a review.

How the System Works — Step by Step

What Protex AI Detects

The Clients — Amazon, Tesla, DHL and Fortune 500

The client roster is perhaps the most striking fact about Protex AI that has never appeared in a mainstream tech article. Three of the world’s most recognisable logistics and industrial companies — companies that between them operate some of the largest warehouse networks on the planet — have adopted Protex AI’s platform.

The DHL deployment is the most publicly documented of Protex AI’s client partnerships. DHL Denmark partnered with Protex AI as part of its Group Strategy 2025 — a formal strategic initiative aimed at enhancing safety measures and optimising logistics operations across its Danish network. DHL is the world’s largest logistics company, operating in more than 220 countries and territories with hundreds of warehousing and distribution facilities globally. Its adoption of Protex AI’s computer vision safety platform represents a significant commercial validation — a company of DHL’s scale conducting rigorous vendor evaluation before committing to any technology partner at the operational level.

The Amazon and Tesla partnerships have been confirmed by multiple sources including Sifted’s Industrial Tech briefing and coverage of the Series B round, though the specific terms, scope, and scale of those deployments remain undisclosed by both parties.

Protex AI reports an average 64% reduction in risk within three months of deployment across its client base — a figure cited in its Series B announcement and independently reported by Sifted’s industrial tech briefing.

The Funding — $54 Million From Salesforce, Hedosophia and Y Combinator

Protex AI has raised $54 million in total across three funding rounds. The investor list is notably high-quality for a company at this stage — it includes several of the most respected names in global venture capital.

The Series B in January 2025 was described as oversubscribed — meaning investor demand exceeded the amount Protex AI needed to raise. That detail matters: oversubscribed rounds indicate strong investor conviction and competitive demand to participate in the company’s growth.

The US Expansion — Why Boston?

The US market is the primary growth opportunity for Protex AI for a straightforward reason: the US warehouse and logistics sector is the largest in the world, with significant regulatory pressure around workplace safety from OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and growing insurance cost pressures pushing companies to adopt proactive safety measures.

Protex AI CEO Dan Hobbs relocated from Ireland to Boston to lead the US expansion personally. The company is actively growing its US team and has already secured major American clients including Amazon and Tesla. Boston was chosen for its proximity to both the major East Coast logistics hubs and the concentration of enterprise technology buyers in the Northeast corridor.

Privacy — How Protex AI Handles Worker Data

The most sensitive question about any computer vision system deployed in a workplace is the privacy question. Workers may be concerned that the same cameras monitoring safety are also monitoring their performance, tracking their breaks, or creating footage that could be used against them individually.

Protex AI addresses this through a combination of technical and design choices. All video processing happens on-site through edge computing — footage is not sent to any cloud server and is processed locally before any data leaves the facility. The system uses advanced anonymisation to protect individual worker identities in reports and insights. The explicit design philosophy, stated on the Protex AI website, is that “data supports learning instead of blame” — the system is designed to identify environmental and systemic safety risks, not to single out individual workers for disciplinary action.

The company is listed on the AWS Marketplace, which requires independent security and compliance review — and its privacy-preserving architecture was specifically cited by Salesforce Ventures as a competitive differentiator in their investment announcement.

Awards and Recognition

• Verdantix Video Analytics Report 2026 — Ranked #1 among video analytics providers for industrial safety
• Forbes Europe 30 Under 30 — Technology (2023) — Both co-founders Dan Hobbs and Ciarán O’Mara included
• Deloitte Fast 50 Rising Star Award 2025 — Awarded in association with Enterprise Ireland
• Sifted Top 100 European Startups 2026 — Ranked #21 — highest-ranked Irish AI company on the list
• Technology Ireland Ibec Industry Awards 2025 — Outstanding Achievement in International Growth

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Mr Wangdoo

Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Mr Wangdoo is the founder and editorial lead of Wangdoo.com, an independent technology news publication launched in September 2025. All articles are fact-checked against primary sources before publication. Where commercial relationships exist, they are disclosed clearly within the relevant article.