Elevator Pitch
We gave Cloud M founder Richard Gill 60 seconds to pitch his software service Blerter. He went longer, but it was worth it.
What is Blerter? Blerter is a worksite safety network platform, built to keep track of everyone coming and going on a worksite and make sure they are qualified to do the job they are doing, from a safety perspective. With Blerter, everybody on a site has their own profile with all their qualifications and certifications and training on it.
So let’s say someone is working at height or with a harness, you can look them up and check: Are they qualified to do that? Do they have relevant training? If they don’t, you get them down. Or, hit a button, see who they work for, and call their boss.
Blerter also acts as a platform for companies which run sites to integrate all the health and safety processes: hazard identification, incident reporting, safety observations, meetings and documents. All that stuff they do on paper today, they can now do in-app in real time. Everyone checks into a site; anyone can report stuff that goes wrong directly to the health and safety guys, and they can act on it instantly and share that around the network. Is the New Zealand market big enough for Blerter? We’re passionate about keeping Kiwis safe, but as a company we’re very focused on taking our product global. You don’t invest this kind of time, money and energy building high quality software just for the New Zealand market. Worldwide, 2.3 million people die each year from jobrelated injuries or illness. The US alone kills 4,500 people a year in workplace accidents, and the total cost of deaths, injuries and illness is $US250 billion a year to the American economy. How much money do you need? We’re in-market raising $5 million for our first large round to fund our US entry. What are your impediments? There are two challenges. One is ensuring best market fit. The problem we’re solving is complex. It’s about humans; it’s about existing patterns of culture. We need to find visionary customers, early-adopter customers.
The second thing is executing a global expansion. Getting the strategy right and not biting off more than we can chew.
But these are exciting times. Blerter is a highly disruptive product because it changes the whole underlying paradigm around safety. We’re disrupting a paperand forms-based system with a peoplebased system.
More importantly, we’re trying to disrupt the injury rate, as opposed to just disrupting another business. We want to save every life we can. And we’ll build a giant business doing that.