• One of Australia’s newest tech unicorns, SafetyCulture, has seen a 57% increase in users since the middle of April.
• The company’s iAuditor app provides checklists companies can use to ensure they’re meeting safety requirements.
• SafetyCulture COO Alistair Venn said retail was the fastest growing sector on its platform.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

One of the newest Aussie tech unicorns, SafetyCulture, has seen a substantial uptick in users since the middle of April.

The company, valued at $1.3 billion earlier this year, provides an app named iAuditor which generates checklists companies can use to ensure they’re meeting safety requirements. Since the middle of April, its daily active users have grown 57%, with inspections also increasing 85%.

SafetyCulture COO Alistair Venn told Business Insider Australia that overall iAuditor usage figures were at record highs across Australia. “There’s more people using iAuditor today than ever before in the history of the company,” he said.

Venn said the company had been on an upward trajectory prior to the coronavirus pandemic, but he acknowledged that its growth has been supported by the rise in new business requirements caused by the coronavirus.

“Last year we grew our business 87% year-on-year, so we were already tracking on a pretty good trajectory,” he said. “So I wouldn’t say that all of the increase can be directly attributed to the pandemic, but it certainly has created new use cases.”

While SafetyCulture traditionally focused on industries people would typically consider hazardous – like mining, manufacturing and construction – the coronavirus has shifted this idea. Venn said “the definition of a dangerous workplace has changed irrevocably”, meaning the company has a broader market it can now serve.

The company has seen substantial growth in the retail and hospitality sectors. Retail in particular is the company’s fastest growing sector – up 76% – despite being an industry that traditionally wouldn’t be subject to rigorous safety and health procedures, Venn said.

Venn said the biggest change in retail is that a business’ safety practices are now a customer-facing value proposition for the first time ever.

“Retailers in particular, I think were the industry that had the least kind of muscle memory and experience when it came to health and safety,” he said. “For them, it was about just opening their stores and making sure they provide a great customer experience.”

SafetyCulture is now supporting retailers who may be losing business to other stores nearby because customers feel more comfortable shopping there due to their safety practices.

“Customers certainly express a preference to say ‘I would feel more comfortable going to one restaurant over another or one store over another if I knew more about the preventative measures that they were taking’,” Venn said.

“But that’s not a very transparent experience, it’s hard to know what’s happening behind the scenes. So we’re helping businesses to implement better practices and then share that information with their customers better to build that confidence.”

Digitising government guidelines

While the iAuditor app allows businesses to create their own safety checklists – and over time improve on them – for the first time, SafetyCulture has proactively digitised hundreds of government and industry body guidelines into checklists.

“We have a hub on our website that anyone can go for free and put in what their industry is [and] what country they operate in and it will spit out a list of guidelines that have already been converted into these digital checklists,” Venn said.

It’s about helping people bridge that gap between knowing that they need to do something and actually being able to act.

“Governments are doing a great job publishing all these guidelines but unfortunately they’re quite often written in legal speak and not that easy for a person behind the counter at a retailer or a waiter in a restaurant to understand all of that information and to implement it in their daily life,” Venn added. “Our whole premise is the power of converting complex concepts into something as simple as a checklist.”

Around the world, there are 26,000 businesses using iAuditor and 75,000 unique users conducting a COVID-related check every day.

With the pandemic continuing to thrust several businesses into disarray, Venn believes the only way to prevent the “yo-yo of going in and out of a very hard shutdown” is for businesses – and society more broadly – to adopt preventative measures on a daily basis.

He gave the example of eyewear brand Luxottica in Australia, which has 430 retail stores. They initially rolled out hygiene and COVID-related checks across all their stores which they attempted to complete using the traditional pen-and-paper method with auditors travelling to different stores. But with the iAudior app, the company has been able to save three hours per check.

New safety tools

SafetyCulture recently launched two new products, though not specifically in response to the coronavirus.

The first is an module that captures incidents that happen in the moment and shares it with a company’s team to get it resolved as soon as possible.

“We try to make it as easy as possible for people to proactively share anything that doesn’t look right,” Venn said. “It might be a trip hazard or a maintenance issue. It might be something as simple as a light bulb is out in the stairwell.

“And anyone in the organisation can create one of these [incident reports], they take a photo of what’s going on and depending on how they’ve classified that incident, the right people in the organisation are immediately notified.”

The other new technology SafetyCulture released was a suite of internet of things (IoT) wireless sensors. These have a battery that can last up to two years and can be stuck on a wall with double-sided tape.

“They can monitor critical information in your business and proactively let you know if something has gone wrong,” Venn said. The most common application for the sensors at the moment is temperature monitoring, whether that’s inside a fridge, a refrigerated truck, or to check the ambient temperature inside a warehouse.

Venn said the company is passionate about taking a “bottom-up approach” rather than the traditional compliance model of getting one or two people to walk around and do spot checks. The company is also looking at how it can use the information it has gathered to help businesses improve efficiency and costs.

“In terms of the longer term view what we’re really excited about is, the more information we capture with our customers, the more we can proactively add further value to their business,” Venn said. “Right now, it’s about ‘How do I capture things in the moment so that we can make the right decisions and we can reduce risks?’

“But the more we can improve the amount of information that staff members are capturing through iAuditor or whether it’s through sensors – the more information and data we get there, the more proactive advice we can start to give to those customers.

“And we can start to say: ‘Did you know that the same piece of machinery has failed in four different factories in four different countries around the world? And it seems to be happening every two months. There’s an issue here [and] this is how you can proactively start to improve the efficiency or the costs of your business’.”

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