Luke Anear Bets Mitti's Future on AI—and Insurance Claims

Luke Anear has spent most of his career selling safety software to the world's frontline workers. Now he is making a different kind of bet: that the same company can survive the generative AI storm by moving into insurance claims and slicing its products for individual industries. For anyone tracking Australian tech wealth, it is a telling test of whether a founder-led software firm can adapt before the ground shifts beneath it.

Anear, founder and chief executive of the Australian software company Mitti—formerly known as SafetyCulture—told The Australian Financial Review that he has made more decisions in the past eight months, as he tries to adapt the business to generative AI, than in the previous decade. The company is beginning to underwrite insurance claims, and it has personalised its safety products for specific sectors. Those are the concrete moves on the table. No deal value, valuation or ownership figure was disclosed, and none should be assumed from the shift.

The context matters for readers outside Australia. Mitti built its name as SafetyCulture, a Brisbane-born software maker whose flagship product became a familiar tool for site inspections and workplace safety checks across construction, logistics and hospitality. Founder-led and grown from a startup into one of the country's more prominent software exporters, it sits in a cohort of Australian tech companies that reached scale without the deep domestic capital markets of the United States. Renaming the parent Mitti while keeping the safety business underneath is the kind of structural reset that often precedes a new chapter—or a new pitch to investors.

Why does insurance underwriting belong in a safety-software story? Because the data a safety platform collects—incident reports, inspection records, compliance histories—is exactly what insurers need to price risk. Moving from selling software to helping underwrite claims pulls Mitti closer to the money flow of its customers, a higher-margin position than seat-based subscriptions. Personalising products by sector is the other half of the same logic: generic safety tools are easy to copy, but a product tuned to, say, construction or food processing is harder to displace. Anear's framing—more decisions in eight months than in ten years—suggests a founder who believes the window to reposition is short.

For Oceania's wealth map, the signal is about how the region's founder-led software fortunes are being defended. Australia has produced a thin but notable layer of self-made tech billionaires and near-billionaires, many of them running companies that sell into global markets from a small home base. Generative AI threatens precisely those businesses: it can commoditise features, compress pricing and force rapid reinvention. Anear's response—vertical specialisation plus a push into insurance—is a case study in how such founders try to convert customer data into a moat rather than watch it become a liability.

The coming months will show whether the pivot holds. Insurance underwriting is a regulated, capital-hungry business, a long way from shipping safety checklists, and sector-specific products demand deeper sales work. Anear has staked his company's next phase on making those transitions quickly. For the international reader watching Australian capital, the question is simple: can a founder who built a safety-software champion remake it fast enough to matter in the AI era? The answer will shape more than one balance sheet in Oceania.