Manchester jobs hope as £85m raise lifts Aussie tech business to unicorn status

SafetyCulture Manchester Office

Australian tech company SafetyCulture has closed an £85 million round to fund further innovation for its larger enterprise customers, accelerate AI adoption, and reward its long-term employees. 

The funding round, which values the hand held app developer at £1.3 billion, was led by Airtree Ventures.

In the UK alone, SafetyCulture’s workplace operations platform is used by more than 25,000 businesses to enable better working practices and boost productivity. Its Manchester office houses SafetyCulture’s growing EMEA team as it expands its customer base, which already includes the NHS, National Grid, British Airways, and Transport for London.

Earlier this year SafetyCulture said it would double its headcount in central Manchester after a A$34m capital fundraising.

Two of its senior executives were in Manchester in Fenruary to cut the ribbon on highly designed new offices in a 9000 sq ft suite at Bond, a refurbished 19th century bank building in Manchester city centre’s Mosley Street, owned by Bruntwood SciTech.

Announcing the completion of the funding round, SafetyCulture’s Founder and CEO, Luke Anear, said: “We have now closed this round and are excited about the opportunities it creates for us to accelerate our growth and help even more customers. It’s a tough environment to be raising in, but we’re proud of the results the business is delivering and pleased that we can continue to create regular liquidity events for early investors and long-term employees.” 

The funding round follows the launch of SafetyCulture’s workplace operations platform in October 2023, which introduced new capabilities in training, asset management, sensors and IoT functionality. 

With 85,000 businesses and close to 2 million users around the world now using SafetyCulture, customers are continuing to embrace the platform and roll it out to more of their teams.  

The company has seen record growth in sign-ups, and its average customer has doubled in size over the last two years. SafetyCulture has added 100 new roles over the past six months, with more than 800 employees now working from its six offices around the world, to support its accelerating global growth and track towards its ambitious target of reaching 100 million users by 2032. 

In 2023, SafetyCulture introduced AI-enhanced features, such as mobile-first training course creation and instant inspection template generation from prompts, images, or files. However, SafetyCulture believes there is still much more potential for AI to change the lives of frontline workers.

“We’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to transforming frontline work. Few tech companies have our direct reach to frontline workers across so many different industries, so we have both a responsibility and a massive opportunity to create significant change for these people”. 

“We’ve built the world’s largest repository of workplace data, containing over 5 petabytes of data and billions of images. AI is the way we can make sense of that information, and if we can harness it properly, we’ll effectively be able to give frontline teams superpowers that will completely change the way they work,” said Anear.

Commenting on the significance of this deal for Airtree Ventures, Kell Reilly, Partner at Airtree Ventures, said: “Having tracked SafetyCulture’s journey to date, now is an opportune time to join them at this inflection point. SafetyCulture has all the hallmarks of Silicon Valley’s tech heavyweights–a compelling vision, product, scale and team. We’re excited to partner with another Aussie success story that’s making waves on the global stage.”

The round was led by Airtree and joined by existing investors Blackbird and Morpheus Ventures.

 

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