By Joseph Hanna, Co-Founder and CEO

When the opportunity came to build Haven alongside AI Fund’s deep technical firepower and The AES Corporation’s real-world safety expertise, it didn’t feel like a startup idea. It felt inevitable. A no-brainer. The right team, the right moment, and a problem too important not to tackle. 

There are some problems you choose to solve, and there are some problems that choose you.

As a child, I did not understand the words “root cause analysis,” “systemic risk,” “OSHA recordable,” or “safety culture.” I just observed that sometimes my dad came home hurt, and that feeling stays with you longer than any explanation ever could.

Twice, those injuries changed the trajectory of our family.

The first happened when he was in his early thirties during what should have been a routine digging operation. He was not wearing proper eye protection. In a moment that probably felt ordinary at the time, he permanently lost vision in his right eye.

The second came a few years later when an overhead irrigation pipe broke loose and started to fall toward a group of workers. Instinct took over. He stepped in to shield the people beneath it, and the heavy pipe shattered his right shoulder.

Two incidents. Each was just seconds long. Consequences that lasted decades. Surgeries, recovery, and limitations that never fully went away, followed by the quiet tradeoffs that ripple through a family’s life in ways most people never see.

The Hanna family circa late 1970s. I am in the back. This was taken a few years before the second incident

If you grow up around that, safety stops being abstract. It stops being compliance paperwork, OSHA filings, and insurance checklists. It becomes personal.

You realize that every incident report represents a real person. A parent. A son. A daughter. A provider. Someone whose life might split into before and after because something small was missed.

Although there are many flashier applications of AI in transforming areas like robotics, marketing, sales, or supply chain, I find protecting workers to be one of the most meaningful and consequential uses of the technology. The outcome is not metrics optimization or improved margins, but whether someone makes it home safely at the end of the day. To me, it is second only to transformative healthcare applications of AI. 

Why are safety teams still conducting investigations the same way they did twenty years ago, relying on manual interviews, spreadsheets, static templates, systems of record, and tribal knowledge that disappears when someone retires?

Meanwhile, incidents are becoming more complex, not less. Modern workplaces are systems of systems, with contractors, sophisticated equipment, shifting crews, heavy machinery, changing environments, and layers of regulation.

We are building Haven to save lives. 

AI is not a replacement for safety professionals. It is leverage.

When people hear “AI in safety,” they sometimes imagine automation replacing humans. That is not what we are building.

Haven is designed as a copilot, a system that gives safety leaders leverage rather than replacing their judgment. It helps them gather evidence faster, surface patterns humans cannot easily see, connect today’s incident to years of historical knowledge, and turn scattered facts into clarity.

In other words, it helps answer the question every investigator asks: what really happened, and how do we make sure it never happens again?

AI is uniquely suited for this kind of work. It can read thousands of documents in seconds, compare an incident to thousands of prior cases, extract timelines, highlight inconsistencies, and suggest deeper causal threads without ever getting tired or forgetting what it learned yesterday.

But most importantly, it gives time back.

Time to talk to workers.
Time to think.
Time to prevent the next injury instead of just documenting the last one.

That is leverage.

And in safety, leverage saves lives.

Haven is personal

I have seen what happens when safety fails, and I have lived through the long tail of consequences that follow a single moment on a job site. I have seen the hospital visits, the long recoveries, and the many ways an injury reshapes what someone can do for the rest of their life.

And I have always wondered: what if someone had caught the risk earlier?

What if the right PPE had been obvious?
What if the hazard had been flagged?
What if the previous near miss had actually been connected to the next incident?
What if the system had helped instead of relying on memory and luck?

Those “what ifs” are the reason Haven exists.

We are building technology that turns chaos into clarity, helps safety teams move from reactive reporting to proactive prevention, and remembers every lesson so no team has to relearn it the hard way. 

If we do our job well, fewer families will have stories like mine. Fewer kids will grow up watching a parent come home injured. Fewer moments will divide life into before and after.

That is the mission.

And it is why we are building Haven.

Joseph Hanna
Co-Founder and CEO, Haven