SafetyCulture unveils new name, features to help Mitti

Australian unicorn SafetyCulture has changed its name to Mitti, 22 years after founder and CEO Luke Anear started the workplace safety business in Townsville.

The company, which is valued at $2.5 billion, unveiled its new identity on Tuesday, along with a suite of new AI capabilities and a renewed focus on its insurance offerings.

The name Mitti is drawn from SafetyCulture’s previous insurance joint venture with QBE, according to The Australian. SafetyCulture took full control of the insurance offering in 2023 when it bought out QBE’s 50% stake.

Mitti was also chosen, according to a statement from the company, because one of its meanings is “middle”, and this fits with the company’s new positioning as “the centre of an operation where decisions get made and work happens”.

While SafetyCulture started out as a platform for businesses to manage safety in their workplaces, the company is now seeking to be a one-stop operations shop for frontline work.

“Our customers have told us for years they’re using us for much more than safety — they’ve been capturing quality issues, maintenance faults, training gaps, risk signals, all of it,” Anear said in a statement provided to SmartCompany.

“That told us who we’d actually become long before the name caught up.”

The new identity coincides with the release of additional AI capabilities, including a tool called 5 Star Benchmarking, which is designed to give organisations that operate more than one site a single score for each of their work locations.

The tool will give Mitti customers “one number telling them where to look first”, said Brian Swift, vice president of AI at Mitti.

“Our customers were never short on data. Every inspection, action and issue report was already there — they just couldn’t see what it all added up to.”

Mitti is also rolling out AI agents and assistants to help with routine tasks and information gathering, as well as a feature called AI Issue Creation, which turns photos, videos and voice notes into ready-to-review safety issues to speed up reporting.

But Anear says the core mission of the business hasn’t changed.

“We’re still here to improve the way the world works,” he said.

“But AI has overhauled the workday for people at desks and barely touched anyone else.”

While workplaces might use data in the office, this is not always true for frontline workers, who Anear says have “been at the back of the queue for this stuff for years”.

“We’re changing that,” he said.

The AI capabilities of the Mitti platform means businesses can now get a clearer picture of what’s happening on their frontlines, said Anear.

“The same inspection that keeps a site safe also sharpens its performance rating, trains its team, routes its orders and prices its risk, all within the Mitti platform. AI turns all of those moving parts into a single, real-time view of what’s happening and what to do next,” said the founder.

“That reflects the kind of business this was always meant to be — the operating system frontline businesses run on.”

Mitti’s userbase now sits at 80,000 organisations and more than two million workers, and customers including Marley Spoon, Thermosash and St Vincent de Paul Society Victoria are already using some of these new AI features.

The technology is also underpinning a renewed focus on the company’s insurance offering, which can link up a customer’s operational data with their commercial insurance.

Anear, who returned to the role of CEO in February this year, said this real-time data is a point of differentiation from other insurers. According to the founder, Mitti has already written nearly $200 million cumulative gross written premium (GWP) in Australia.

“So we know the model works,” he added.

“Now we’re taking it global, kicking off with the US where we’re now licensed across 51 states and jurisdictions.”

There’s an opportunity for Mitti to niche down too, says Anear. The company is exploring building software that is specific to particular frontline sectors, for example.

“Software has never been faster to build,” he said in the statement.

“But that’s exactly why it matters who’s behind it: there’s more noise for customers than there used to be, and it’s harder for them to know who to believe.

“We’ve earned our intelligence through 15 years of deep customer relationships. We’re innovating faster than ever, not to keep pace with the market, but to solve the real problems that make frontline businesses better.”

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