Melbourne Builder’s start-up Visibuild runs hot among data centres, raises $6.6m

The son of a south Melbourne builder, who has built a software start-up that has been likened to SafetyCulture, has raised $6.6m to develop a platform offering real-time updates on construction projects.

From left: Visibuild co-founder and chief executive Damien Quinn, Skip Capital founder Kim Jackson and Visibuild director Ryan Treweek.

A Melbourne builder whose software start-up is widely used on data centres and operates a similar checklist to SafetyCulture has been backed by Skip Capital, the private investment firm founded by Kim Jackson, who is married to Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar.

Visibuild has raised $6.6m as the start-up, founded by Damien Quinn, aims to be the first platform in the world to give real-time updates and data on major construction projects.

Mr Quinn has been a registered builder for 18 years, first working for his father’s business, Wimbledon Homes, in Melbourne’s south and later Multiplex, where he worked on some of the city’s largest projects.

One of those projects was the Shangri-La on La Trobe Street, a development that inspired the idea behind the start-up.

“I was running two 60-storey towers which effectively had 120 floor plans of live construction happening with up to 1000 contractors,” he said.

“And it’s incredibly hard to manage … It’s 30 meetings a week, hundreds of phone calls, dealing without 20 supervisors plus all the leading hands of the subcontractor group.”

Mr Quinn said he had spent months looking for a solution to track construction updates in real time but there was nothing on the market. After months of not being able to find something, he decided to build it himself.

“I certainly never expected to be running a software company, hand on heart, I’m a builder and I loved it,” he said.

“I expected to continue climbing the ranks through Multiplex. You don’t do 15 years in one business not expecting to stay there for a long time.”

The outcome is a mobile-first platform that requires tradespeople to complete their quality assurance via its mobile app rather than on paper. That data can then be tracked on a mobile or web platform by the builder or the owner of the project.

The platform has been used on 700 projects since it was founded three years ago, with it becoming a staple of new data centre projects.

Part of that was thanks to Kapitol Group, the builder of several data centres including those of NextDC and which had become a customer.

“I would say more than 50 per cent of data centres being built in Australia are using the Visibuild platform,” Mr Quinn said.

Data centres were one of the “hottest topics” in construction this year with everyone looking for a way into the businesses.

“If you’re a builder that doesn’t know how to build data centres, you’re trying to work it out because there’s so many coming,” Mr Quinn said.

When it came to quality assurance, data centres were being built to some of the strictest standards in Australia.

“They’re of critical importance because they’re built really quickly and you don’t have the luxury of, say, an apartment, because you can’t get back in,” Mr Quinn said.

“Once they’re done, they have to be finished perfectly because you cannot disrupt those things. There’s an enormous amount of quality checks. One project in Melbourne at the moment has 1200 concrete piles in the ground and there’s an inspection on every one. On a normal commercial project in the city, there would be 40 or 50 piles.”

Visibuild’s next big bet was on renovations and rebuilds with the data it collects providing a blueprint for projects with an enormous amount of data, Mr Quinn said.

“Particularly, if you end up in a position with an insolvency, which has unfortunately happened quite a bit in the industry recently. Unfortunately, some contractors go bankrupt and our platform allows these trades to work together and transfer that data and get up and going again,” he said.

Part of the bet helped convince Kim Jackson’s Skip Capital to back Visibuild’s first raise.

“Visibuild is tackling a critical challenge in construction, and their approach will bring real-time visibility and accountability to building sites around the country,” Ms Jackson said, adding that she believed “the scale of the opportunity before the team is vast”.