From Small Town to Global Impact: Voxel is Now Serving International Markets
Troy Carlson
June 17, 2025When we started working on what would become Voxel in my San Francisco garage in 2020, I never imagined we'd one day be preventing workplace injuries globally. This week, our team landed in Rotterdam for TOC Europe, marking our official international expansion. Yet our mission remains the same: building technology that ensures every worker goes home safe.
Growing up in an 800-person town in West Michigan, technology wasn’t at the center of daily life. Long before I knew what code was, I spent countless hours playing hide-and-seek on home construction sites with my siblings, watching woodchips pile up into small mountains at the sawmill next door, and making precariously tall towers out of hay bales at my friend’s family farm. While us kids were having a great time, the adults in my life all worked and earned a living in these sorts of environments.
My dad spent over 40 years working at the same manufacturing facility, building conveyor belt solutions for industrial-scale mining. This wasn't the kind of work you read about in tech blogs - it was physical, messy, and often dangerous.
My childhood was defined by the reality of industrial work: metal shavings scattered throughout our house, my dad coming home with cuts, grease-stained hands, welding burns, and stories of close calls at the shop. I visited on “Bring Your Kid To Work Day” and saw the heavy machinery, hazardous materials, and constant risks that shaped his daily reality.
As a young kid, the loud noises and big machines were captivating. My dad always made it home so the risk wasn’t top of mind for me, but the darker truth was that not everyone was as fortunate as my dad. Throughout his career, he collected stories about colleagues losing limbs, forklift accidents, and workers who didn't make it home.
It took me a while to recognize how much influence my dad’s work experience has had on my own career. These weren't just stories—they were problems begging for solutions. I never imagined I would be deploying cutting-edge technology across the globe alongside the brightest minds in the industry. At times, my childhood and my career have felt like two completely different worlds, but at Voxel, these worlds have collided.
Code With Consequences
Throughout my software engineering career, I’ve always gravitated towards mission-driven companies and teams. I’ve also spent plenty of time working on problems that just didn’t feel very consequential to me. That’s not to say those problems weren’t worth solving, but they didn’t have the direct, positive impact on the world that really energizes me. They weren’t things I was uniquely positioned to solve.
Since Voxel’s inception, the opportunity in front of us immediately resonated with me. The founding team brought together expertise from autonomous vehicles, computer vision, and distributed systems—but more importantly, we were all dedicated to solving real-world problems. We weren’t building abstract systems for fun, we were building real solutions for people like my dad.
Working on technology which interfaces with the physical world provides a constant stream of interesting technical challenges. How do you distill millions of hours of video footage into insights that non-technical supervisors can actually use? How do you train computer vision models to detect ergonomic risks in real-time? How do you scale AI across different industrial environments while maintaining accuracy and reliability?
Every feature we developed had to pass a simple test: would this actually prevent someone from getting hurt? This wasn't about optimizing click-through rates—it was about building technology that could identify a risky lift, spot a vehicle-pedestrian near-miss, or detect unsafe liquid spills before they led to injury.
The engineering problems were intellectually fascinating, but they came with weight. Every line of code we wrote had the potential to prevent real injuries. Every false positive could erode trust with frontline workers. A missed detection could ultimately mean someone doesn’t go home safe.
Building Technology That Scales Global Impact
Today, Voxel’s platform processes video feeds from industrial sites around the world, detecting safety risks in real-time and providing predictive insights that help prevent workplace incidents. We've built a platform which can adapt to different industrial environments and local safety regulations while maintaining enterprise-grade security and compliance.
Our hybrid cloud system enables multinational customers to maintain centralized visibility while meeting regional data privacy requirements like GDPR. The technical architecture required to support this global expansion has been the most challenging and rewarding engineering effort of my career. Every single day I’m impressed by the work that Voxel’s engineering team is doing. I feel incredibly lucky and grateful to learn from them and work alongside them.
The impact is measurable: customers have reported up to 91% reduction in recordable injuries and over $2.2 million in cost savings at individual sites. But for our engineering team, the most meaningful metric is simpler—we're helping ensure that thousands of workers across dozens of countries have safer places to work.
Today, my sister works at the same facility where my dad spent his career. When our team deploys a new computer vision model or expands our platform to a new region, it's not just about hitting engineering milestones—it's about creating technology that protects people I care about.
Join Us in Building AI That Matters
We're rapidly scaling our engineering team to support this global expansion, and we're looking for engineers who want to work on problems that extend far beyond the typical Silicon Valley playbook. If you're tired of optimizing ad-serving algorithms or building dopamine hooks into consumer apps, come help us build AI that saves lives.
We need engineers who can tackle the most complex computer vision problems, build distributed systems that handle global data flows, and create intuitive user experiences for frontline supervisors in high-stress environments. Most importantly, we need people who share our passion for building technology that has real-world impact for individuals and their families all over the world.
As a small town kid sweeping metal shavings off the kitchen floor, I never imagined I'd work on AI systems protecting people like my dad all over the world. But maybe that's exactly what this industry needs: engineers and doers who understand that behind every safety metric and KPI are families hoping their loved ones come home safe.
We're building the future of workplace safety, one line of code at a time. Want to help? Our open job descriptions are here.