Mar 16, 2022

Who says you can’t raise money after 20 years in business ? Protecht co-founders former PWC colleagues, David Bergmark and David Tattam have raised $42m after starting their risk management software company 22 years ago - in 1999 - having built it to a $20m pa company - with revenue primarily in Australia and NZ. They knew they could scale globally after testing the UK and USA market - and  David has moved to Santa Monica to Scaleup Protecht!! They knew they needed capital to do it! They hired a US-based advisor, who contacted over 250 growth equity funds, before narrowing down a list and got Santa Monica-based global growth equity firm Arrowroot Capital came on as its lead investor. And have raised $A42 million  Clients  The company primarily services  mid sized companies in financial services, government and university sectors. It has over 300 clients including Tyro, Toyota Australia, the Sydney Opera House, the National Rugby League and Melbourne Polytechnic. What Protecht does  Protecht’s software supports companies manage its enterprise risk across the business -  identifying key risks, adding mitigating controls, and continually monitoring risks through key-risk indicators and capturing incidents. Traditionally, risk management has been performed in silos across organisations, with each department focused on its own segregated risk, usually in the form of an excel spreadsheet. “It’s inefficient, it's ineffective, the board don't get what they want in a consolidated view as they get different reports,” Tattam says. “Protecht.ERM (enterprise risk and compliance management) is about consolidating that all together so the board gets what they want at a higher level. “The client receives a dashboard covering all the risks of the enterprise that's able to be drilled down so that the coalface get what they want and, the principle we try and aspire to is: one source of truth, multiple uses of the data.” Although financial services, especially in the US, remains the target sector for Protecht, risk management is now standard practise across many sectors. Protecht’s approach, regardless of risk type or risk category, allows for integrated, consistent reporting across all departments on a simple web-based platform with workflow rules and analytics, irrespective of industry. “Our mission has always been and remains to change the way the world thinks about risk and deploy innovative risk management technology to support excellence in risk management,’ Tattam says. About Arrowroot Capital  Arrowroot is a Growth fund investing in scaleups Protecht is the third Aussie investment for Arrowroot, which has previously backed HammerTech, Snaplogic and  Fluent Commerce  , and they are keen to invest more in Aussie companies . Why? “Australia has a strong core ecosystem with early stage investors helping companies get off the ground and a great university ecosystem creating computer scientists and engineers to launch these companies.” Posted by