How I won a $2 million grant from Commercialisation Australia

Whispir started as an IT company more than 10 years ago, working on a collaboration and crisis management tool for the construction and engineering industry, but then ended up branching out, working with larger companies such as telcos and banks.

Now, the company has won a $2 million grant from Commercialisation Australia to develop its new technology, Open Whispir.

Chief executive Jeromy Wells talks to SmartCompany about the company’s history, and the process of applying for the grant.

Can you talk about Whispir and what it is you do?

We were founded as an unlisted public company back in 2001. At that time we raised a little bit of money to help develop and commercialise our business plan. We had a proof of concept plan.

Initially we were seeking to provide a solution for the building and construction industry, because at that time there wasn’t a particularly high penetration of the internet within that sphere. Specifically in the construction industry things are very fragmented, lots of employees employing less than five people and so on.

What’s the technology you developed?

We developed a technology that allowed users to collaborate. It was a mobile solution, and it allowed them to keep track of what was going on at any one time, crisis management and that sort of thing.

I think we developed great technology but the market wasn’t ready for it. Because of the mobile component, however, we picked up some partnerships and Vodafone decided they could use the tech in their business community.

Since then we’ve been the clear market leader in crisis communications management and disaster recovery.

Can you reveal your revenue?

Last year we had revenue of $4.9 million, and the year before it was $4 million, and the year before that it was $2 million. We’ve had significant growth this year, and we’ve just launched our London office. We’re beginning to take our place on the world stage.

Open Whispir is the technology you’re putting through Commercialisation Australia. Can you talk about the product and what it does?

Open Whispir is a new product and complementary to our existing structure. A lot of our clients will purchase Open Whispir on top of the existing platform, but you can use it independently.

It’s a collaboration tool. It incorporates social media and other information to give you information about whatever event or crisis is happening, and allows you to get a picture of something as it is unfolding.

It sounds like some sort of instant messaging program.

Communications is a big part of it, but the challenge for a lot of organisations is that they get a little bit of information in a crisis, but it’s difficult to expose that to the community.

Take the Queensland Government for instance, in the response to the flood, emergency services did a great job but there was a real challenge for those organisations to get out the information they needed through various channels to help the community.

So how does that work for individual companies? What will they see when they use your software?

The product itself has various dashboards. Every user has a different view depending on what their profile is, so it could be task management, live feeds of social media, maps, micro blogging, etc, along with real time maps with icons that are being formulated depending on the activity that’s unfolding.

We’re aggregating communications, but also other data, so you can manage your response.

What made you decide to go for a commercial grant?

It’s all about timing, really. We’ve had a couple of years of being a profitable operation, and the business has been growing significantly. We’d been working on a lot of R&D through the last couple of years, and we’ve resisted the temptation to apply for a grant early. We wanted to wait until it was easy for us to articulate the value of the product we had.

Can you talk about the process and preparing your company for all that?

It was kind of funny in a way. It was pretty streamlined, we didn’t engage any consultants to provide us advice, we reviewed the material we had, and we were pretty sure we were at the right stage to maximise the effectiveness of our product.

Part of the problem for us is that the market is so new for this, so it’s hard to describe the benefit. The market there is not advanced just yet.

What happened when you first submitted?

We submitted our application, and had a positive response for stage one. We met our case manager and there was a period of due diligence where they tested the assumptions and shook the organisation down.

We’ve invested in all that from the outset though, so it was easy for us to do that. We’re used to that level of interrogation.

What type of information did they want?

Plenty of stuff. They want to know about revenue, customers, the quality of the product, market validation, and so on. There was a lot of talking to existing references and channel partners.

There was a good amount of due diligence done, and after that we were invited to submit a stage two submission. It was hundreds of pages, but all of that was supporting documentation that was all about the product. It provided us an opportunity to really explain what it is we were doing and why we thought it would be successful.

Now that you actually have the grant, what’s going to be the biggest hurdle for you now?

The challenge now will be attracting quality talent to see us through the next period of growth.

Would you recommend this avenue for other businesses that are searching for capital?

For sure. We weren’t trying to cook a story here, we thought we had a great product and it was something we waited for until it was developed enough to apply for a grant. It was such an easy approach for use and it allowed is perfectly to do what we want to do.