Having spent 37 years in the electrical industry, a US native based in Australia has secured $400,000 of initial seed funding to launch QuickSafety, an app intended to make electronic safety compliance testing more accurate, more efficient, and safer for the people conducting them.
Kurt Alexander, founder and chief executive of QuickSafety, created the QuickSafety app to replace the “archaic paper-based system” of compliance testing in electric systems.
The startup was accepted into the BlueChilli accelerator program, and following a little help with the development process, workspace offerings, mentoring and marketing, Alexander is now set to launch the venture within the next three months.
Several major clients have already signed up ahead of the official launch, including Jolimont Global Mining Systems.
“The mining industry is a good proportion of what we do,” Alexander tells StartupSmart.
“Electronic circuits here are tested between every month and every three months.”
All electronic circuits are tested to ensure they meet particular standards set out in the Electrical Safety Act. However, according to Alexander, electricians don’t typically have access to accurate figures, relying instead on guess work, estimation, and mental arithmetic.
Through its own analysis, Alexander says QuickSafety found some 42%of systems that had been certified as safe did not in fact meet the standards required.
The app crunches the numbers for the contractor or electrician, showing immediately whether or not the circuit is within safety guidelines.
It’s usable both online and off, and once the figures are recorded they’re shared in a web portal with all interested parties — for example, the building owner, contractor, electrical safety testing provider and the electrician themselves.
The law also requires these records to be kept on file for five years, something that’s difficult when it comes to paper copies.
“Companies are trying to store all the pieces of paper on every single circuit … it never happens. They want to be able to come back to the contractor,” Alexander says.
“We store that for five years, in a secure format, which they can’t tamper with.”
In fact, Alexander is committed to moving to a blockchain-based system by the end of the year, making use of the transparent, immutable and permanent records the technology affords.
According to Alexander, through improving record-keeping and accuracy of results, the app can reduce users’ risk of non-compliance with safety-testing rules, and therefore save them money. He points to an example of a contractor who was recently fined $60,000 for three compliance breaches.
“The biggest thing that we do is de-risk every single entity: the electricians, contractors, construction companies, mining companies. We’re reducing everybody’s risk profile,” he says.
But his real passion is in the app’s potential to save lives. Part of the reason he applied for the BlueChilli accelerator in the first place was to get the product to market as quickly as possible.
QuickSafety is synced with 15 Australian agencies that share safety updates and issue product warnings or recalls. Alerts are shared to QuickSafety users immediately, and the app is disabled until the notification is acknowledged.
“My first concern was safety for our guys and girls in the field,” Alexander says.
“There are no mechanisms anywhere that will give our guys and girls in the field first-hand alerts that could actually prevent death, prevent electrocutions, prevent harm and prevent industry loss.”
