Unleash Live founder Hanno Blankenstein says infrastructure operators, including miners, are moving from “experimenting with computer vision use case by use case toward standardising it across their assets, sites and capture methods”.
“Our next decade is built around helping them make that move, backed by deployment scale and evidence,” Blankenstein said this week on the Sydney-based company’s 10-year anniversary.
Unleash Live counts BHP, Alcoa and Chevron as major enterprise clients and raised A$17 million (US$12 million) of series B equity funding last May at a reported circa-$100 million valuation.
It describes itself as an industrial computer vision company, routing sensor, drone, fixed-camera and satellite visual data into enterprise asset management and enterprise resource planning workflows to generate “governed, scalable intelligence across sites, asset classes and operational functions”. The company says its technology supports automated inspections and asset management in mining, energy, utilities, transport and municipal markets.
“Technology moved fast over the last 10 years and it will keep moving fast,” Blankenstein said.
“What actually took the work was earning the trust of operators running assets where a mistake has real consequences: safety consequences, regulatory consequences [and] financial consequences.
“That trust gets earned one deployment at a time, by showing up in the field and being right, repeatedly, under real operating conditions.
“That’s shaped how I think about the next 10 years as much as any technology roadmap has.”
Blankenstein said Unleash Live target industries were chosen “where the cost of missing a problem is highest” and built deep expertise in each area. The company now has about 40 employees.
“I started in Sydney with a small team and a simple observation: operators responsible for some of the most critical infrastructure in the world were still relying on people walking sites, checking clipboards and hoping nothing had changed since the last visit,” he said.
“That gap in how operators managed risk across their assets is what I built Unleash Live to close.
“That idea is now a global team of computer vision engineers, AI specialists and domain experts, working with tier-one infrastructure operators across utilities, mining, oil and gas and transport in Australia and North America.”
Unleash Live had developed automated remote inspection and close-range, continuous monitoring and reporting tools. The company claims to have assessed and analysed circa-97 billion images in an asset portfolio worth $69 billion, cutting 70% of manual inspection while hitting a 91% F1 detection score across deployed AI apps.
“Visual intelligence is moving beyond recorded video,” Blankenstein said.
“The next phase is continuous, spatial and automated insight that responds as conditions change, giving operators the time to act before an issue escalates.
“That’s where the market is heading.”
