SafetyCulture boosts its workplace safety tools, hits $1.6B valuation

SafetyCulture, a startup developing software for workplace safety and quality management, today announced that it closed a new round of funding, valuing the company at $1.6 billion. Led by Insight Partners and Tiger Global, SafetyCulture CEO Luke Anear says the funds will support growth as the company evolves from a checklist app into an operations platform for working teams.

Failure to provide a safe atmosphere at work is a costly mistake for both businesses and their employers. The National Safety Council estimates a worker is injured on the job every seven seconds, which equates to 4.6 million injuries a year. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health pegs the costs of work-related injuries and illnesses at $170 billion a year.

Queensland, Australia-based SafetyCulture, which was founded in 2004, offers a mobile and web app called iAuditor for workplace safety and quality standards; it’s designed to collect data, standardize operations, and identify problems. The platform enables users to create customized forms from paper checklists, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets, as well as take and annotate photos, add notes, and assign follow-up remedial actions. With SafetyCulture, managers can have teams share observations outside of regular inspections and generate reports for contracts, clients, and more, which can be exported to third-party platforms and tools. They can also connect to sensors — either SafetyCulture’s own or third-party sensors — to monitor work conditions in real time.

“The SafetyCulture journey started with a simple question: How do we keep people in the workplace safe? After witnessing the tragedy of workplace incidents in my time as a private investigator, I realized something needed to be done when it came to safety in the workplace,” Anear told VentureBeat via email. “I went on to recruit a team to help develop a mobile solution and so, iAuditor was born. When we started out this journey in my garage in regional Australia, we had no idea where it would lead. We’d created the first iteration of a digital platform that went on to revolutionize safety inspections globally. It’s now the world’s largest checklist app — and that’s just the beginning.”

SafetyCulture supports text and email notifications that trigger as soon as sensors detect changes that are out of the normal range. Customers can set alerts for things like local weather and have employees capture test results with barcode scanners, drawing tools, Bluetooth thermometers, and more.

Above: SafetyCulture’s mobile app, iAuditor.

Image Credit: SafetyCulture

Last September, SafetyCulture acquired EdApp, a learning management system akin to LinkedIn Learning, for a reported $29 million. At the time, SafetyCulture said that EdApp, which was delivering around 50,000 lessons per day, would enable it to offer “micro-learning” resources to workers in a range of industries.

Market momentum

SafetyCulture claims to host over 1.5 million users across 28,000 companies on its platform in more than 85 countries. It powers 600 million checks per year and millions of corrective actions per day, according to Anear.

“Statistics-wise, we’ve seen inspections within iAuditor grow 108% year-over-year and actions grow 161%. This indicates our customers are using our software across a far broader range of use cases, from safety to quality and customer experience. It also suggests our customers are benefiting strongly from the workflows we have built into iAuditor over the last couple of years,” Anear said. “This additional data makes our analytics functionality all the more powerful. As working teams input more and more data, organizations benefit from increased visibility and a broader base of staff contributing to driving safety, quality, and efficiency improvements.”

With 54% of U.S. employees worried about exposure to COVID-19 at their job, the pandemic has helped to drive SafetyCulture’s growth — even in the face of rivals like Aclaimant. According to a recent Pew Center survey, about 25% of employees say that they’re “not too” or “not at all” satisfied with the steps that have been taken in their workplace to keep them safe from the coronavirus. To address this, SafetyCulture created a number of checklists tailored for companies affected by the crises, including cleaning and disinfection logs as well as employee temperature log sheets.

“We’ve built a reputation globally for helping some of the most dangerous industries digitize and adhere to safety and quality protocols. Unfortunately, everywhere is a high risk in a pandemic, so 2020 saw a major push to ensure retailers, schools, hotels, and many other industries had the right support and tech to manage COVID-19,” Anear said.

SafetyCulture’s most recent funding round — which brings the company’s total raised to roughly $241 million — follows a $36 million tranche contributed by TDM Growth Partners, Blackbird Ventures, Index Ventures, former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his wife Lucy Turnbull, and Atlassian cofounder Scott Farquhar. The company’s employee base grew 2.5 times in the past three years to over 500 people, and SafetyCulture says it plans to continue the same hiring trajectory “for the foreseeable future.”

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