SafetyCulture raises AU$30m in Series B round

Townsville-founded technology company SafetyCulture has secured AU$30 million in a Series B round of funding, bringing the total amount raised by the company to just under AU$41 million.

SafetyCulture's latest investment round was led by Index Ventures, with contribution from existing investors Blackbird Ventures and Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar.

The funding, which Internet Dealbook claims to be the second-largest to be raised by an Australian tech company this year, will be used primarily for talent acquisition as part of its global expansion strategy. SafetyCulture is looking to grow its engineering, product management, customer support and marketing teams across its San Francisco, Sydney, and Manchester offices.

The investment will also be used to accelerate the rollout of new features and transform SafetyCulture into a platform.

"We now provide 24/7 support with teams in the UK, USA, and Australia and we will continue to expand in these key markets. As we scale we want to build a company where leaders can execute the vision and move quickly without too much structure," said founder and CEO of SafetyCulture Luke Anear.

"Now our focus is finding more great people who share our passion for solving a global problem. SafetyCulture has achieved about 5 percent of our long-term vision, so the additional funding will allow us to grow, push forward with our product roadmap, and bring new features to market quicker."

It was in 2011 that Anear began transforming his business from a workplace health and safety consultancy into a technology company with a range of workplace safety and management apps in its portfolio. Its most successful product is a smartphone app called iAuditor, which allows workers to complete mobile safety audits on-site, create smart checklists, analyse data, and share insights in real time.

The app aims to put safety and quality applications into workers' hands by providing them with instant access to almost 70,000 safety inspection checklists obtained from companies across the world. Workers that encounter a new problem -- such as needing to remove asbestos from a construction site -- can search the app for a checklist that will ensure they are working safely.

"Modern workplaces, to keep up with compliance and regulation policies, need more than a static checklist to identify what is functioning in the workplace and what is not," said Jan Hammer, general partner at Index Ventures, who will be joining SafetyCulture's advisory board alongside co-founder of Blackbird Ventures Richard Baker, with Farquhar continuing as an advisor.

"SafetyCulture, with its ability to enable consistent, standardised experiences at a large scale, is outpacing a growing industry with its proactive solutions and is poised to increase its industry lead."

Anear said organisations gain more insight with each inspection conducted and use the collective knowledge of their teams to make more informed decisions.

"Our Data Scientists are working with the data from the 1.2 million monthly inspections to help our customers benchmark and improve their results. We have the largest repository of safety and quality data in the world, so we can now help customers understand what is working well and what needs to be improved in real time," said Anear.

SafetyCulture is also building a real-time incident reporting app called Spotlight so that as soon as something happens, the relevant people can be notified and respond.

"It is all moving closer towards a complete platform that provides real-time risk management for organisations," said Anear.

Currently, iAuditor is used 50,000 times a day in more than 200 countries around the world, and has conducted more than 30 million audits since its launch.

The company boasts clients like Qantas, Coca-Cola, Coles, BHP Billiton, Hilton, Emirates, Siemens Healthineers, and others across 20 industries.

Mark McNamara, the ANZ head of strategy and process at Siemens Healthineers, said the app has helped the company save 30 minutes per maintenance inspection and about AU$170,000 in 10 months by reducing time and paper wastage.