QBE invests in local gamification crisis training startup

Local start-up Iluminr has raised over $4.2 million in a capital raise led by QBE Ventures as it eyes the US market for its 15-minute resilience training microsimulations.

Iluminr says it has built “the world’s most engaging resiliency platform,” using gamification to help organisations better manage crises such as cyber-attacks, supply chain disruptions, natural disasters, and covid challenges.

How firms prepare for and respond to critical events is “vastly” different to before covid, it says, and traditional training has not kept pace with demand, changing workforce dynamics and hybrid working, resulting in “disengaged audiences from executive down”.

Teams now need to be equipped to deal with floods, political unrest, supply chain shortages, disease outbreaks, ransomware and more.

“We have an opportunity to radically improve how organisations engage staff and manage their critical response capabilities,” Sydney-based Iluminr CEO Joshua Shields says. “We are confident our platform will help reinvent a category where the current offerings are either broken or simply not delivering value.

“Until now, there has been no meaningful way to engage organisations in building resiliency.”

Iluminr, which lists “don’t be beige” as one of its core values, has over 50 customers, including Ramsay HealthCare, GPT and University of Sydney.

The capital raise will allow it to double the size of its team and open new distribution and sales channels. It is recruiting in sales, marketing and engineering after securing a major US financial services customer.

“The US offers significant upside,” Mr Shields said. “It is dominated by old legacy technology providers and outdated training approaches. Our business model deliberately challenges the status quo and is attracting significant attention.”

Mr Shields co-founded Iluminr with Marcus Vaughan, former Managing Principal Growth Strategies at Aon. Brisbane-based Mr Vaughan told a July roundtable many firms rely on just e-learing and annual tabletops for resilience training, perhaps with a refresher meeting.

“It is really hard to build culture and change behaviour when there’s just so few touch points,” he said.

Iluminr’s microsimulations are “short sharp tabletops boiled down to 15 minutes online that give people a thumbs up at the end and they can see their progress,” he says.

“It’s about leveraging technology to get that force-multiplier effect to change behaviour … using gamification to essentially get our resilience programs in a state of viral play,” he said, adding that 75% of the workforce will be digital native by 2025.

“The touch points on resilience are typically quite limited, this might be once a year or twice a year. What we’re starting to see with micro simulations is that engagement ramp up. Clients are rolling out micro simulations on a fortnightly basis.”

This more regular interaction is leading to “an increase in muscle memory around the response functions and better and more effective use of their response tools when game days come along”.

“It is all about starting to change small behaviours … doing it in a way that doesn’t just hit people over the head with the stick.”

The capital raise is QBE Ventures’ first investment in an early-stage Australian-based tech firm. US-based Rebellion Ventures and local VC firms Investible, Flying Fox and Jelix Ventures also participated in the round.