Australia's SafetyCulture hits $1.7b valuation

Tiger Global Management, Index Ventures, and local VC firm Blackbird Ventures also participated. It comes seven months after Blackbird led a A$48.5 million round and about a year after a A$60 million round led by TDM Growth Partners. Total funding to date comes to more than $210 million.

SafetyCulture launched as an eight-person team in 2004 in Townsville, a remote Queensland city of fewer than 200,000 people known for its mining industry, as a safety inspection checklist app. As the company has evolved into a more comprehensive operations platform for working teams, it has expanded into verticals such as manufacturing, hospitality, retail, and logistics. It now has more than 1.5 million users globally, according to a statement.

The new funding and valuation follow an expansion into training services with the acquisition last year of EdApp, a US-based online microlearning app. EdApp claims to disrupt traditional workplace learning via smart phone micro-lessons said to improve employee engagement. The idea is that new business models are evolving at speeds that require a faster and more integrated approach to training and inspection, especially post-pandemic.

EdApp and iAuditor, SafetyCulture’s flagship product, serve a combined 28,000 companies a day via a mobile-first platform, with iAuditor alone recently surpassing 100 million completed inspections. SafetyCulture’s founder and CEO Luke Anear said that additional acquisitions would be a key focus going forward. The employee base has grown 2.5x in the past three years and there are plans to continue on this hiring trajectory.

The user base expansion has been mostly in non-paying customers. SafetyCulture uses a freemium model, whereby its basic services around charge best-practice protocols on crisis management, business resumption, social distancing, and working from home can be accessed without charge. Once users are hooked, there is an attempt to convert them into paying customers, but this has not been a priority during the company’s ongoing rapid growth phase.

“Now is not necessarily the time to be pushing large paid campaigns to get organizations using the product,” Alistair Venn, COO of SafetyCulture, told AVCJ last year. “We want to help during this time and hopefully people will see the benefits. For example, we have increased the payment threshold for iAuditor Premium to 10 users, while frontline support workers can use the product free for six months with an unlimited number of users.”

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