SafetyCulture completes $47 million Series C funding round
Leading Australian workplace solutions tech company closes largest raise in 2018, turning it into a $330m business.
SafetyCulture, the company that facilitates more than a million safety and quality inspections per month, has today announced it has successfully completed a $47 million Series C funding round. This is the largest raise in 2018 by an Australian company.
Index Insight: How Technology Is Shaking up the $150 Billion Safety and Quality Inspection Industry.
SafetyCulture is best known for its award-winning checklist app, iAuditor, which empowers teams to improve safety and quality in the workplace by reporting safety issues and non-compliances as they happen. Companies using iAuditor – which include Coca-Cola, Coles, Ausgrid, BHP Billiton and Qantas – can create smart checklists, conduct on-site inspections, analyse data and share insights in real time. Currently, iAuditor is used by over 50% of the ASX Top 100 companies.
The capital raise was led by New York investment firm, Tiger Global Management. Other investors include previous supporters Blackbird Ventures, Index Ventures, Morpheus Ventures and Scott Farquhar (co-founder at Atlassian). Following this funding round, SafetyCulture has raised a total of $74 million and is now valued at $330m.
The funding will be used to accelerate SafetyCulture’s global go-to-market expansion, build out its product and engineering teams in Australia, and invest in new areas such as internet of things (IoT) and workplace training.
Luke Anear, Founder and CEO of SafetyCulture, said: ”SafetyCulture is expanding at a breakneck pace. In the last year alone, over 100 new staff were hired to support the company’s growth. However, most of the world don’t know we exist; they’ve never heard of SafetyCulture. This funding means that we can continue to build great products, better serve more customers and have a bigger impact on safety and quality for workers all around the world.
Rick Baker, co-founder of Blackbird Ventures said SafetyCulture had pioneered a bottom-up sales model reminiscent of Atlassian.
“SafetyCulture continues to power ahead, and this funding round reflects the fast growth and low customer acquisition costs it has been able to achieve. The capital injection will allow SafetyCulture to continue to scale and bring better workplace safety to the world,” he said.
Jan Hammer, Partner at Index Ventures and an early backer and board member of SafetyCulture, said SafetyCulture was redefining how companies approached safety and quality assurance.
“SafetyCulture has attacked a $150 billion market that still largely relies on checklists recorded on paper. We’ve been impressed at how quickly some of the world’s largest companies rolled out SafetyCulture’s iAuditor app — clearly addressing a pressing need. The market is ripe for disruption and SafetyCulture is leading the way,” added Hammer.
SafetyCulture has attracted 15,000 organisations (of which over 4,000 are Australian) to its platform, and has grown its staff from 85 in 2017 to 214 employees today across its offices in Sydney, Townsville, Kansas City, Manchester and Manila.
SafetyCulture also recently released its second app, Spotlight, which is an incident reporting app that allows teams to act immediately, with real-time alerts for incidents, hazards and near-misses.
SafetyCulture is now looking for new commercial sites for its global headquarters in Sydney and to accommodate its growing team in Kansas City. It will more than triple its team in the US and UK in the coming year. Over the next three years the company aims to reach over 100 million users on the platform and become the global standard for safety and quality management across all industries.
“Australia has a huge future in technology and we are proud to be able to play a role in developing that. Such a significant injection of overseas capital allows us to further grow and invest in our local talent. This is an exciting time in SafetyCulture’s history. We have only built one percent of what our customers need. We reached 15,000 companies with minimal sales or marketing, and now it’s time to take SafetyCulture to the rest of the world,” added Anear.
About SafetyCulture
SafetyCulture is on a mission to empower workers to make safety and quality a priority and improve workplace standards. Founded in a garage in Townsville by former private investigator Luke Anear, SafetyCulture now has more than 200 staff with operations in Australia, the US, the UK and the Philippines. The flagship app iAuditor was launched in 2012 and is used for more than 300 million audit responses each year to ensure high safety and quality standards. Spotlight, SafetyCulture’s latest offering, makes incident, hazard and near-miss reporting a collaborative, real-time experience for teams.
SafetyCulture supports the worker-driven movement for change at the most iconic companies in the world, including Coles, BHP, Coca-Cola and Ausgrid. In order to bring the technology to all mobile devices, SafetyCulture collaborates with Apple, Microsoft, and HP. For more information, visit www.safetyculture.com.
Published — May 21, 2018
