QBE makes first early-stage Australian tech investment

17 October 2022

QBE Ventures has made its first investment in an early-stage Australian-based tech firm, leading a funding round of over $4.2 million in local start-up Iluminr, which uses gamification to train for crises such as cyber-attacks, supply chain disruptions, natural disasters, and pandemics.

US-based Rebellion Ventures and local VC firms Investible, Flying Fox and Jelix Ventures also participated in the round.

Iluminr plans to roll out its 15-minute resilience training microsimulations in the US.

“We are confident our platform will help reinvent a category where the current offerings are either broken or simply not delivering value,” Sydney-based Iluminr CEO Joshua Shields says. “Our business model deliberately challenges the status quo and is attracting significant attention.”

Iluminr has more than 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.