Photo courtesy of Ganesh Ramalingam
AUSTIN, Texas, May 01, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Zapdos Labs, an AI software company headquartered in Austin, Texas, with an office in Singapore, has closed a $500,000 USD pre-seed funding round to expand its AI Video Agent platform for manufacturers. The company’s platform connects to a factory’s existing CCTV cameras, reads the facility’s own safety manuals to configure itself, and monitors live feeds in real time to detect safety violations and near-misses before accidents occur, all within approximately two days of deployment.
Until recently, computer vision systems required months of labeled training data and large technical teams for every use case, pricing tier 2 and tier 3 plants out of real-time monitoring entirely. Today’s VLMs can read a factory’s safety manual the same way they read any other document, then apply it directly to live video feeds with no manual labeling required. That capability enables Zapdos’ platform to deploy in days rather than months, and on existing camera infrastructure at a price point mid-market manufacturers can absorb.
Zapdos AI Video Agents identify exclusion zone breaches, PPE non-compliance, and high-risk behaviors, then send instant alerts through Telegram, WhatsApp, or existing video management systems. The company also maintains Unblink, an open-source video infrastructure project with more than 1,400 GitHub stars, reflecting a developer community no closed competitor in the space has built.
Within 60 days of launching, Zapdos Labs signed a contract with the Air Force and secured additional pilots with Fortune 500 enterprises. It is currently operating in Texas and Singapore, with anchor sites rolling out across North America and Southeast Asia.
The company has also gained recognition from Slingshot 2025, Enterprise Singapore’s national deep tech competition, which named Zapdos among its Top 60 DeepTech Startups amongst 8000 companies, and from the NVIDIA Inception Program. Zapdos placed first at the Nebius Hackathon for Real-Time Vision Language Models and received a grant from ElevenLabs.
The pre-seed funding will go toward expanding the engineering team and onboarding additional anchor sites.
Zapdos Labs was co-founded by Ganesh Ramalingam (CEO), who served in an elite signals intelligence unit before turning to industrial AI, and Tri Nguyen (CTO), who holds a Master’s in machine learning from the University of Basel and previously led engineering at Ubisoft. Ramalingam started the company after losing his uncle to a workplace accident, one he believes continuous real-time monitoring could have prevented.
“One accident changed everything for our family,” said Ganesh. “That never left me. The mission is simple: make sure no family ever has to take that phone call again.”
Tri Nguyen, CTO and Co-Founder, added, “Video AI has finally caught up with what manufacturers actually need. We chose to build on vision-language models because they let us learn each customer’s environment from documents the customer already has. No labeling, no waiting. That changes who can afford continuous safety monitoring, and over time, what else we can run on top of the same infrastructure.”
Manufacturing remains one of the world’s largest industries without continuous, real-time visibility into day-to-day operations. The United States alone has more than 250,000 manufacturing establishments, with similarly large markets across Southeast Asia, where many mid-market plants still rely on paper checklists and periodic human audits to track safety.
Zapdos Labs’ customer interviews indicate that these facilities can spend an average of $400,000 per year on compliance while carrying approximately $7 million in unhedged liability tied to unrecorded near-miss incidents. For Zapdos Labs, that gap points to a broader opportunity to bring software-based monitoring to factory environments that have long operated without continuous digital oversight.
About
Zapdos Labs is a software company headquartered in Austin, Texas, with an office in Singapore. The company builds AI Video Agents for manufacturing and industrial environments, connecting to existing camera infrastructure to provide real-time safety monitoring, near-miss detection, and automated alerts. The goal is to make continuous safety supervision accessible to mid-market manufacturing facilities.
Contact Information:
Contact Name: Ganesh Ramalingam
Company Name: Zapdos Labs
Contact Email: ganesh@zapdoslabs.com
Website: https://www.zapdoslabs.com
Austin, Texas
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/490086b7-2b11-41dd-9f28-43e1f03407f6
