Savage art beat drives growth
BASED out of an unassuming office on Elizabeth Street in North Hobart is a Tasmanian software company which is taking on the world.
James Cuda and his wife, Alanna, registered their tech start-up Savage Interactive on the same day Apple guru Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPad in 2010.
They worked on the business from a spare bedroom in their home at Old Beach and launched Procreate, which has become the No.1 bestselling paid app worldwide on the iPad for four years in a row.
Procreate is a sketching, painting and illustration app for the iPad. Built for creative professionals, it enables artists to create drawings and paintings as if they are using old-fashioned pencils and paint brushes.
Company co-founder Mr Cuda first moved to the state at age 20 in 2000.
“I was looking to find myself and I just knew at that point in time, Tasmania was giving me the space to discover who I was away from my family and old mates. I came here for a six-month holiday and still haven’t left,” he said.
More than 20 years later, Procreate has elevated Mr Cuda’s software engineering team to Silicon Valley royalty and has been used by artists at Disney, Mattel and Pixar.
Savage’s major markets are North America, China and Europe. The office has grown to have 50 staff, snapped up from all over the world. Recruiters are always on the lookout for the next tech star, but that doesn’t always mean having to look far afield.
“Some of my best and brightest are from Tasmania,” Mr Cuda said.
The ICT private sector generated more than $1bn for the state’s economy in 2019, representing about 3.1 per cent of Tasmania’s gross state growth.
It is the state’s seventh largest non-public sector employer group, with about 7200 people in ICT jobs across both the government and private sector.
Savage’s growth has meant plans for expansion had to be fast-tracked.
The Mercury revealed last month the team had snapped up a prime Hobart CBD property that had previously been the subject of a controversial hotel proposal.
In May 2017, Singaporean company the Fragrance Group lodged development applications with the Hobart City Council for a 120m-high, 400-room hotel at 28 Davey Street and a 75m-high, 495room hotel at 2 Collins Street — worth a combined $230m.
In March 2018, the Fragrance Group announced it had downsized the height of
its Collins Street hotel to 50m in response to feedback, but it was refused by council.
Mr Cuda confirmed the site would be the future home of Savage Interactive.
“What we’re trying to do is build a home – somewhere that’s recognisable and iconic for Tasmania,” he said.
“We want somewhere if there’s a very talented engineer in say, Germany, we want them to come see our home and be excited to work here.
“Our products are all about beautiful design and exceptional performance, we’re trying to figure out how we translate that into a physical place of work.
“We’ll be spending a significant amount of capital that we’ll be using to try to make something that is sustainable – we want to bring in nature and make it Tasmanian. So in the interior we want to plant trees, grass and have that balance between hi-tech and nature.”
Mr Cuda said it would be a number of years before the doors open at Collins Street and the company had also considered Macquarie Point as a location. In the meantime,
they’ve bought a building on Elizabeth Street to redevelop and expand into while the Collins Street work progresses. Their growing pains have been exacerbated by a huge uptake in consumer electronic devices since COVID-19 hit.
This growth is something Tasmania should be capitalising on and the University of Tasmania had an important role to play, Mr Cuda said.
“At the moment, the
UTAS curriculum mainly teaches people how to be entrepreneurs – I don’t think that’s great, because it’s very hard,” Mr Cuda said.
“Product design across all technology is hot because we’re discovering now, when things are nice to use … people really like to use it. Apple has been doing that for years.
“But UTAS hasn’t caught on. They’re not teaching anything about product design and what they are teaching is
outdated. That sounds very critical, but I feel very strongly about that and we don’t take many UTAS graduates because they’re not really able to compete at the level we compete at.”
Mr Cuda said this period following the global pandemic presented Tasmania with opportunities to find new revenue sources, such as exporting technology knowhow and products.