20. FYLD

Founders: Shelley Copsey, Anish Patel, and Karl Simons
Year founded: 2020
Website: fyld.ai

Imagine you’re tasked with carrying out important street work in a busy UK city. Unsure what hazards or potential obstacles may be onsite, you ask for an assessment of the area – and get handed a ream of paper forms filled with illegible handwriting.

FYLD is an AI-based startup that aims to drag the outdated risk assessment process into the twenty-first century. Innovation has moved slowly so far, with many organisations still migrating from pen to keyboard. But FYLD is thinking bigger than just digitising reports.

Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), image analysis, and predictive reasoning, FYLD has created a real-time video risk assessment (VRA) tool. Think of it like the hazard perception test for driving, except this time with a mission statement to prevent life-changing injuries and fatalities.

One case study for a waterworks company saw FYLD spare an estimated 6,000 hours of work for managers and 2,600 hours for fieldworkers – a productivity saving of around £1m.

FYLD says the tool is easy to use and can assist the user with identifying, assessing, and mitigating job risks. It also allows managers to make interventions from a remote location, removing obstacles to productivity and making data-informed decisions.

Primarily targeting the construction sector (according to the most recent HSE report, there were a total of 39 fatal injuries to construction workers in 2021 alone), FYLD also has potential cross-sector use for any remote workforce operating in industrial or dangerous environments.

Less dramatically, FYLD is also a useful aid for avoiding project delays and overspending. One case study for a waterworks company saw it spare an estimated 6,000 hours for managers and 2,600 hours for fieldworkers – a productivity saving of around £1m.

FYLD's disruptive tech could soon be inseparable from the idea of modern health and safety practices

Indeed, fieldworkers of all types are embracing the technology and using it on a daily basis – as FYLD’s rapid expansion demonstrates. At the time of writing, the platform’s usage extends to over 100 organisations and five different continents, with the first US-based project completed in Texas earlier this year.

After raising £10m in Series A funding, FYLD plans to continue its remarkable growth journey and expand into new markets and territories in 2024.

Given the preventative ambitions of its technology, we’ll never truly know the value of FYLD, particularly for those it’s protecting. Our best guess? This disruptive tech will soon be inseparable from the idea of modern health and safety practices, as an ingenious tech solution that’s genuinely saving lives.