About Scannable

Scannable’s vision is to make working at height safer. We believe that by removing manual data entry, creating ease around compliance, and giving equipment owners and users easy access to information about their gear, critical decisions about equipment become less about guesswork, and compliance is made easier.

Our story

Scannable Founder Rob Stirling knows that nobody got into Arboriculture or Rope Access because of their love for paperwork. He has spent the last eight years building solutions to minimise the time spent on compliance and safety checks.

Scannable aims to bring easy-to-use technology into the high-risk workplace. Our primary focus is on arboriculture, rope access, rigging, and rescue, because that’s what we know, and it’s who we know too.

Rob founded Scannable with the hope that making equipment management easier will increase the frequency of equipment inspections, doing his bit to make traditionally high-risk occupations that much safer for the people who trust their lives to their equipment every day.

Scannable brings together Rob’s professional experience, having worked with DMM, Teufelberger and Edelrid since 2014, and the network of equipment users, retailers, and manufacturers he’s built relationships with along the way.

Our core values

Scannable has been founded on the same core principles that we live every day.

Our goal is for our core values to guide everything we do, because we know this determines the positive impact we will have on the people we help and those who help us.

Responsibility and Accountability

Our industry is built on trust. We know that you won’t put your life in the hands of a brand or product that you don’t trust, so we hold ourselves to that. This is important to us because you as a high-risk worker need to evidence responsibility and accountability to succeed. We’re on a mission to empower people to be responsible and accountable.

Care for people and our planet

Scannable is an international team, currently based out of New Zealand. We are inspired by the Māori value of kaitiakitanga. Kaitiakitanga is based on traditional Māori world views, nurturing the connection of people and the environment, preserving the mana and mauri (life force) of the environment, and safeguarding the future. Everything we do has an impact on people and the planet. We are inherently motivated to improve safety for high-risk workers, and we strongly believe that the amount of equipment ending up in landfills is a problem we can help solve.

Currently discarding equipment is the default option if you can’t answer a critical question about that piece of equipment - how old is it, what is its recommended lifespan, etc). Our aim is to use tech to answer these questions so that equipment can be used until the end of its life, not its identifiable lifespan. Another question we will look to answer in the future is what else can be done with retired equipment other than put it in the landfill. By connecting material data with every product, we hope to enable end of life cycle processes, and make them commercially viable.

Pioneering Adventure

We are a company of adventurers and know what it is to make decisions about life saving equipment. Our adventurous spirit drives our ambition, pioneering the solutions to problems that have been too hard for too long—tackling the big data problem that exists in the work at height space, and using this to build tools that remove pain from compliance and commerce.

Authenticity

We are born from the same culture, we’re Level 3 IRATA Rope Techs, we’re mountaineers, rock climbers, paragliders. We get that the character of the market that we serve is down to earth and authentic with no bullshit and plain speak. We know that good communication saves lives. We hold up authenticity as a priority to maintain as we build a business that serves a high-risk market.

Innovation

We’re building technology, not software. With technology comes new possibilities—we don’t get excited about incremental efficiency gains in software, but we do get excited about how technology can tangibly increase safety. Our mission is to answer any critical question about your equipment, because we believe this will improve your decision making.

Our Founders

Robert Stirling grew up in the mountains, heading off on adventures on his Dad’s shoulders. The love that grew from these experiences drove Rob to carve out a career in the outdoor world.
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Rob has spent his career in design and manufacturing. From outdoor equipment produced in Asia to work at height safety equipment produced in the UK, Rob has a passion to solve technical problems and deliver solutions that matter.
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This passion led Rob to launch Scannable in 2020.
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Departing from delivering physical products and solutions, Rob’s vision is to empower the digitisation of these same products in the manufacturing and critical equipment world.
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Gene Dower joined Scannable as CTO and late-stage co-founder in 2021.
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Gene has worked in the New Zealand tech space for the last 12 years, but also knows what it means to trust equipment with his life. Gene’s preferred way to spend a lunch break is flying off Bob’s Peak, above the Queenstown Gondola.