Software start-up likened to Atlassian defies funding slump, raising $27.5 million

A company described as “Atlassian for the built world” has raised nearly $30 million in venture capital, defying the ongoing funding slump that continues to leave Australian start-ups struggling to raise investment.

Sitemate has drawn comparisons with Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar’s tech giant Atlassian for both its growth trajectory and its product, which aims to replace Word and Excel with workflow software tools. The latest funding round has valued the Sydney-based start-up at close to $200 million.

Instead of being aimed at software engineers, however, Sitemate offers software for engineers working on the “built world”, including civil, structural, mechanical and electrical projects.

Sitemate chief executive Hartley Pike is a former field engineer with Lendlease.Credit:

The start-up is led by chief executive Hartley Pike, a former field engineer with Lendlease who found himself buried in paperwork before deciding to start a software company to fix that problem.

“We see so many ‘built world’ companies struggle to adopt and use clunky all-in-one systems, which force many of them to move back to legacy formats like Word and Excel – and even paper – because at least paper, Word and Excel are flexible and familiar,” Pike said.

He said Sitemate’s point of difference is its no-code “building blocks”, which can be configured and combined to meet the needs of thousands of different processes across industries, regions and compliance requirements. He said his company started booming when COVID hit, and industries moved to digitise most of their processes.

“Since we launched Sitemate in August 2018, over six years ago, we have grown every single month consecutively, and our growth rate is still increasing year over year,” he said.

Sitemate has closed a $27.5 million funding round led by Blackbird, with participation from existing investors Shearwater Capital and Marbruck. The company will use the money to fuel its international expansion, including opening an office in Austin, Texas that will join its offices in London, Vancouver and Toronto.

The capital raising comes despite local start-up funding tanking in the third quarter of 2024. The most recent report from Cut Through Venture found investment for the sector fell to $695 million for the quarter, down from $1.5 billion in the prior quarter, with no deals exceeding $100 million and deals worth more than $50 million slumping to a multi-year low. Non-AI start-ups, especially, face challenges in securing investment.

Blackbird Ventures partner Tom Humphrey.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos

Tom Humphrey, a partner at Blackbird Ventures, said it was impressive that Sitemate had doubled its staff over the past 12 months to 140, with close to half female, despite operating in the construction industry.

“The Atlassian comparisons abound – from Sitemate’s focus on embedding deeply into core customer workflows to address productivity to the [...] organic growth focus that has helped the company scale globally.”

Sydney-based Atlassian began in 2002 as a small start-up and grew over two decades into a $100 billion behemoth serving 300,000 customers globally, making billionaires out of its founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar.

The Market Recap newsletter is a wrap of the day’s trading. Get it each weekday afternoon.