QBE Ventures acts as lead investor in capital raise for iluminr, its first AU investment
SYDNEY, NSW and DENVER, CO October 12, 2022. iluminr, the AI-powered resilience engagement platform, today announced it has raised $4.2M in a funding round led by QBE Ventures. The round was also supported by participation from US-based Rebellion Ventures, as well as Australia-based VC firms Investible, Flying Fox and Jelix Ventures. The investment will accelerate product and machine learning development, and fuel the company’s expansion into new verticals and markets.
iluminr CEO and Co-founder Joshua Shields commented that QBE’s investment further underlines that engagement is the key ingredient in building resilience to compounding disasters, be it cyber, natural catastrophes or supply chain. “Our customers had repeatedly told us that until now, there has been no meaningful way to engage their organizations in building resiliency. From day one, the iluminr team focused on building the world’s most engaging resiliency platform, delivering turnkey insight to teams, through scalable gamification.”
iluminr was founded just over three years ago with a mission to help organizations thrive through disruptions with confidence. A modern platform connecting preparedness with response, iluminr empowers stakeholders to identify, manage, and navigate disruptions and mission-critical threats through a bespoke set of cloud-based simulation, compliance, and response tools. Since its launch, iluminr has become an award-winning SaaS platform in the resilience and continuity space. Funding comes as iluminr has generated remarkable customer growth over the past year.
Closing the resilience engagement gap opens real-time insights
Organizations are experiencing disruption after disruption, be it Ransomware, Natural Catastrophes or Supply Chain. Yet many companies are hindered by archaic resilience practices and technology that has failed to engage stakeholders leading to ineffective response, costing millions in losses. iluminr shapes how teams engage in resilience at all levels through scalable gamification, automation and dynamic response toolsets.
iluminr CEO and Co-founder Joshua Shields said, “Resilience is an act of continuous learning through discovery, testing, and response, with your team at the helm. Our business model deliberately challenges the status quo by focusing on simplifying the people aspects of building resilience. We are confident our platform will help reinvent a category where the current offerings are either broken or require significant investment to realize value. We have an opportunity to radically improve how organizations engage staff to manage critical response.”
“The purpose-led approach of iluminr strongly aligns to QBE’s purpose of enabling a more resilient future, and we are excited to work with the iluminr team and help our customers embed resilience in their business,” said James Orchard, CEO, QBE Ventures.
The capital raise represents QBE Ventures’ first investment in an early-stage Australian-based tech firm, providing a foundation for QBE’s growing resiliency proposition beyond its traditional insurance offering.
Building the Muscle Memory for Resilience
As part of iluminr’s commitment to ongoing product innovation, the company recently unveiled its latest feature, Microsimulations. Microsimulations harness gamification, automation, and data insights to provide 15-minute exercises that build teams’ heightened resiliency against a library of threats and crises such as cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions, natural disasters, and pandemic-related challenges. iluminr’s technology empowers people to minimize the loss of life, protect service and product continuity, insulate against reputational damage, reduce compliance costs, and avoid a variety of other impacts due to these disruptions.
Driving Growth through Resilience Self-Service and Agility
iluminr’s Chief Growth Officer and co-founder Marcus Vaughan echoed Joshua’s comments saying “The world changed dramatically during the pandemic. Organizations have undergone significant change and how they prepare for and respond to critical events is now vastly different to what it was 18-24 months ago,” he said.
“Traditional training and enablement in crisis and resilience has not kept pace with today‘s demands, the changing workforce dynamics or the hybrid working environment, resulting in disengaged teams from the executives down.”
Bringing resilience to life
With decades of industry experience from building the southern hemisphere’s largest resilience consulting practice, Joshua Shields together with Marcus Vaughan, have now set out to rapidly grow the team to address global demand for iluminr.
iluminr, a modern platform designed to supercharge engagement in resilience, streamline preparedness and empower response, has been delivering organizations around the world unparalleled results. Through gamification and immersive methodologies such as the award-winning Microsimulations, iluminr has already proven to lift engagement in organizational resilience by 300% over the past quarter alone.
Meet iluminr at BCI world hybrid in November 2022, DRI 2023, DRJ 2023 and Continuity Insights Annual Conference 2023.
