Long before he built software for safety, Luke Anear spent about seven years looking for people who were hurt on the job, or said they were.
He worked as a private investigator for insurance companies, checking workers' compensation claims for fraud. It is an odd start for a man who now runs one of Australia's most valuable private software companies, and it is the fact that explains the company's name. Anear spent years seeing what happened when workplaces went wrong, after the injury and the claim, when someone had to work out what had been missed.
Within months it was valued at A$2.2 billion after a further A$99 million round.
SafetyCulture began in about 2004. The idea was close to a simple promise: replace paper checklists and clipboard inspections with a phone. The product that carried it, iAuditor, let a frontline worker walk a site, tick boxes, take photos and file a report on the spot.
The lean years are quiet in public. What is clear is the scale at which the business later stood. In 2021 it raised US$73 million at a US$1.6 billion valuation, with Insight Partners and Tiger Global leading. Within months it was valued at A$2.2 billion after a further A$99 million round. Anear said at the time that the company had been cash-flow positive for the previous 18 months, a small remark that tells you a lot about how it was run.
He framed the money as fuel for turning a checklist app into a wider operations platform. That is the second turn in the story. A tool that begins with one narrow job, inspecting a site, can become the place where all the routine work of a frontline team lives.
The lesson is a modest one. Anear built a company around a problem he had seen from the wrong side for seven years. He did not need to invent the pain. He had been paid to watch it.