Midwest-Based MākuSafe Passes $10 Million in Funding with Venture Round
July 9, 2020
For Immediate Release
WEST DES MOINES, Iowa, July 09, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — After closing their latest fundraising round, MākuSafe has secured more than $10 million for their worker safety technology and data analytics platform. The venture round was led by EMC Insurance, and included an increased contribution from Next Level Ventures. Both organizations are based in Des Moines.
For four years, MākuSafe has worked to improve workplace safety with their innovative wearable technology paired with an artificial intelligence-driven data analytics platform. The additional funding will provide the capital resources needed to grow their team and deploy technology to customers across North America.
“Our team has grown from two co-founders, to nearly 20 full-time employees in a short time,” said Gabe Glynn, CEO and co-founder of MākuSafe. “With these funds, we’ll continue to add talent to our team so that we can provide a white-glove experience to our industrial and insurance customers.”
The organization added five new positions in June alone, including a mechanical design engineer, vice president of revenue operations and principal data scientist. These new team members bring a wide range of skills to the company as MākuSafe continues to deploy their technology domestically and prepares for their first international deployment coming in August.
Earlier this year, MākuSafe added contact tracing and worker density mapping in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The new features continued the company’s commitment to worker privacy while helping slow the spread of the virus.
The West Des Moines startup has deployed their technology with manufacturers, food processors, construction companies and other organizations across the nation. However, the majority of funding has come from Iowa and other surrounding Midwestern states.
Next Level Ventures (NLV) invests in fast growing companies that are based only in Iowa. NLV increased its investment in MākuSafe with an additional $1M in this round of financing. “MākuSafe has the potential to make a tremendous impact on keeping workers safe. The growth of their talented team and significant traction made for an easy decision to invest further,” said Scott Hoekman, Principal of NLV.
MākuSafe helps keep workers safe using a wearable armband that collects data on environmental conditions, potentially hazardous motion such as slips and trips, and allows workers to record near-miss incidents in real time. No personal or biometric data is collected. Safety and operations professionals then have access to real time, relevant intelligence by location to enhance EHS decision making through the MākuSafe data platform and dashboard, MākuSmart.
MākuSafe officially launched their proprietary SaaS platform and wearable devices in early 2020. Pilot programs conducted across the Midwest in 2019 showed customers significant loss avoidance and a promising return on investment. To learn more about results of MākuSafe pilots, visit www.MakuSafe.com/pilot.
About MākuSafe
MākuSafe is an award-winning safety data & analytics company based in America’s Heartland. Their mission is to improve worker health, safety and productivity while reducing worker compensation claims and mitigating workplace hazards and risk exposures. Founded in 2016, MākuSafe developed patented wearable technology that gathers real-time leading indicators of environmental conditions, potentially hazardous motion data, and voice recorded near-misses from workers, with the location of these occurrences in facility. Their cloud platform, MākuSmart, uses machine learning to identify high-risk trends and generate notifications. The portal makes EHS intelligence immediately actionable, proactively targets remediation resources to specific conditions & occurrences, streamlines hazard tracking and compliance reporting. The MākuSafe system positively impacts safety culture and mindset. MākuSafe delivers their product through insurance carriers, as well as direct to industrial end-users.
