SafetyCulture’s mobile safety management SaaS pulls in $23M Series B, led by Index

SafetyCulture, the maker of a b2b inspection checklist app called iAuditor, has pulled in a $23 million Series B funding led by Index Ventures. Also participating Blackbird Ventures and Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar, who led its Series A round in 2014.

While the Australian-founded company started out way back 2004, with a mission to overhaul safety procedures in the b2b space, its flagship product — the iAuditor app — launched more recently, in 2012, riding the consumerization of enterprise wave that has pushed dedicated b2b apps into the hands of a device-savvy workforce.

The iAuditor app aims to replace paper-based check-lists for safety inspections, to not only speed up checks and make them more efficient but also to enable companies to centralize inspection data so it can be analyzed and benchmarked, and so that risks can be flagged in real-time.

“With each inspection conducted, the organisation gains more insight,” is how CEO Luke Anear couches it, touting the “collective knowledge” generated by inspection teams using the app platform.

Commenting on the investment in a blog post, Index’s Jan Hammer also talks up the “big data benchmarking opportunity” for SafetyCulture. “Ultimately, the company will be in a unique position to offer advanced risk profiles for commercial liability and workers’ comp insurance based on the unique proprietary datasets about its clients’ quality and safety records,” he writes.

SafetyCulture offers a freemium pricing structure for its SaaS, with the iAuditor app free to download for individual users with a 25MB upload and download limit, and price-plans then starting at $9 per month for SMEs, rising to custom enterprise pricing aimed at businesses’ with more than 100 employees.

At this point it has 6,000 paying customers for its SaaS, and around 100,000 users. In all it says it has enabled more than 30 million safety and quality inspections, name-checking the likes of Coca-Cola, British Airways and JD Sports as customers. It touts iAuditor as the “most used workplace inspection platform”, saying it facilitates one million inspections per month at this point.

Custom inspection lists can be built in the app which has a drag and drop editing interface. There’s also a public library of ~56,000 inspection forms built and shared by other users at this point. While administrator controls lock in cloud uploading, and the SaaS platform enables centralized management to ensure staff are using the most up-to-date inspection forms.

Safety and quality checking is a process that obviously extends across all sorts of industries, from high hazard environments such as the construction industry all the way down to supermarkets, hotels and clothes retailers. So the scope of the opportunity here is a very sizable one. Indeed, Index pegs the testing, inspection and certification market as worth $120-150 billion annually — with Hammer further dubbing it a “massive and hidden market”.

“Businesses need more than a static paper checklist to run their operations, ensure compliance and quickly respond to customer needs,” he adds in a supporting statement. “SafetyCulture, via its mobile app, delivers consistent, standardised experiences at a large scale. It is outpacing a growing industry with its proactive solutions and we believe it is well-positioned to increase its industry lead.”

SafetyCulture’s Series B funding will be used to ramp up marketing efforts, and for continued product development, it said today. It’s also planning to increase customer outreach and add headcount globally to support its growth strategy.