SafetyCulture, an Australian developer of apps designed to reduce and report employees’ workplace injuries, announced that it has completed a $45.4 million (60 million Australian dollars) funding round led by Tiger Global Management. This latest financing brings the company's total funding to $66 million, according to Crunchbase.
In an announcement published on the company’s blog, CEO and founder Luke Anear wrote that the investment would help expand SafetyCulture’s team and accelerate development on its mobile products.
“From the beginning we have held a long term view on our mission to put safety and quality into the hand of every worker, and we take the responsibility of serving our customers seriously,” Anear wrote in the post. “At SafetyCulture, we feel like we are at the beginning of a revolution across the world. The smartphone has put computing into the hands of everyday workers, and empowered them to make better decisions. … We are proud to build software that is affordable for front line workers to purchase and use, and we are constantly innovating to deliver the best possible user experience.”
Launched in 2004 out of Anear’s garage as a startup focused on safety documents, SafetyCulture pivoted to mobile apps and in 2012 launched the first iteration of its primary offering, iAuditor, as an inspection checklist app in 2012. Now more than half a decade old, SafetyCulture has expanded iAuditor into a wider product incorporating safety report documentation tools, easy form sharing, digital sign offs, performance and trend analytics, and other features. In 2015 the company also released a cloud platform for safety management teams, and earlier this year launched another app, Spotlight, for real-time incident reporting.
Anear wrote that while SafetyCulture has expanded from 85 to 215 employees in the past year alone, its new capital will allow the company to further grow worldwide customer assistance teams. Other recent or upcoming developments were also mentioned in the blog post, including increased investment in regional data centers, feature updates for iAuditor and Spotlight, and a focused IoT plan currently under development.
“Collecting data at every opportunity is not the goal, we are only interested in meaningful data, that helps our customers make better decisions,” Anear wrote. “Our IoT team commenced in March and we are currently trialing hardware from a number of manufacturers with a broader rollout planned for later this year. Going forward, SafetyCulture will integrate with equipment manufacturers and hardware manufacturers to provide proactive awareness and bring relevant information such as weather events and major incidents to our customers in real time.”
While SafetyCulture and others primarily focus on workplace safety documentation and services, there are also some in the field that offer app-connected wearables or other such devices to actively monitor employees and predict potential injuries, such as Kenzen.
