Australia's SafetyCulture raises a further $35m

TDM Growth Partners led a A$60 million round in April – then $35 million – with support from Blackbird as well as US and UK-based Index Ventures. Index also joined the latest investment, which comprised only A$14 million of equity, according to The Australian Financial Review.

"It's the next stage of maturity for the Australian ecosystem. You’ve got companies now that have demonstrated that they’re global and successful, and the opportunity for investors to buy secondary shares is becoming more popular," Luke Anear, founder of SafetyCulture, was quoted as saying.

“It's very competitive to get equity in these successful private companies before they go public. So, we're seeing interest and appetite from investors to buy common stock, not even preference shares, knowing the company is likely to keep increasing in value.”

It brings total funding to date to more than $132 million, according to AVCJ Research, and positions SafetyCulture as one of Australia’s best candidates for achieving unicorn status. The start-up was valued at A$1.3 billion pre-money at the time of the Series C. Notable shareholders also include Tiger Global Management, Skip Capital - a firm created by Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar - and former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

SafetyCulture’s core product is a mobile app called iAuditor that is said to be used 600 million times a year to help companies in 85 countries create safety inspection checklists, conduct on-site investigations, and analyze data.

Recent expansion efforts have focused on developing iAuditor from a simple checklist app into a platform that improves efficiency by connecting distributed teams. Tech build-outs are also being pursued in analytics, internet-of-things sensors, and telematics capabilities.

Blackbird raised A$500 million for its fourth flagship fund in August. This was said to establish the firm as Australia’s largest VC with some A$1.2 billion in assets under management. Blackbird claimed that its net IRR for every dollar invested across all its funds was 46.7% as of the end of June.

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Support services
• Expansion
• Australia
• Blackbird Ventures
• professional services
• TMT
• enterprise software