There's a paper form somewhere on every construction site in the world. Simon Elliott is coming for it.
He doesn't describe it in those terms. He says things like "digitizing safety workflows" and "automating real-time compliance data." But the effect is the same: the clipboard gets retired, the induction paperwork moves to a phone screen, and the site manager gets a dashboard instead of a filing cabinet.
That's Breadcrumb, the platform Elliott leads as CEO from San Francisco - though the company started life in Melbourne as 1Breadcrumb, a name that said exactly what it did. One breadcrumb at a time, turning analog construction sites into connected, auditable, digital worksites.
The 1Breadcrumb team is excited to bring Five V Capital on board as our first institutional investor.
- Simon Elliott, CEO of Breadcrumb, on the company's $4M raise, June 2024A career spent at the edge of digital transformation
Elliott's career looks, in retrospect, like a guided tour of industries that hadn't yet figured out software. Health tech in Spain. Government software in Australia. Construction safety everywhere. The specifics change; the mission stays constant.
It started in 2002 at Orion Health, where a young Elliott became Country Manager for Spain - tasked with establishing the Rhapsody software platform as the go-to medical integration tool in a foreign market. He succeeded. Then came CSC, where he took on Sales Director and Global Partner Development roles, learning the mechanics of large enterprise sales at scale.
In 2012 he moved to Telstra Health as Commercial Director, and spent two years running a full M&A process that ended with a clean exit for the founders. Not many people learn both how to build a business and how to sell one before the age of 45. Elliott did.
Health tech. Government tech. Construction tech. Three industries, one playbook: find the sector still running on paper, build the digital layer, make it impossible to go back.
After Telstra Health, he co-founded Steply.io - a digital transformation platform aimed at local government forms and processes. It was a quiet rehearsal for the same paper-to-digital rethink he would later bring to construction. Then, from 2016, he started deploying capital as an angel investor with Melbourne Angels, sitting on the other side of the pitch table and mentoring early-stage founders.
By 2018 he had added two more roles: Construction Tech Lead at AIIA (the Australian Information Industry Association) and Non-Executive Director and Investor at Matrak Industries, a material and delivery tracking network for construction. He was learning the construction industry from the inside - not as an operator, but as an advisor and investor - before placing his biggest bet yet.
Breadcrumb: the missing piece in the construction tech stack
In 2021, Elliott became CEO of 1Breadcrumb. The company was already building something specific: a platform to replace siloed safety systems and paper-based processes on commercial construction sites. Site check-ins. Safety inductions. Permit applications. Insurance verification. All of it digitized, centralized, and surfaced in real time.
The construction industry is, by most measures, the last major industry still largely running manual safety and compliance workflows. The stakes are high - construction workers are statistically among the most at-risk categories of employees globally. Regulations are dense. Liability is real. And yet the clipboard persisted.
Five V Capital's Chris Gillings put it plainly: Breadcrumb provides "the missing pieces in the technology stack for high-risk industries." Australia's tight safety regulations and high labor costs made it a natural testing ground for what the rest of the world would eventually need.
Under Elliott's leadership, the platform grew to serve more than 25,000 subcontractors and 300,000 site workers across Australia and the UK. It became the Procore integration partner of choice for safety - meaning it slots directly into the tech stack already used by the world's largest construction firms. That's not a niche workaround. That's a standard.
$4M, Five V Capital, and a flight to San Francisco
In June 2024, 1Breadcrumb closed a $4 million raise led by Five V Capital - the company's first institutional investor. The target: international expansion, with the US and UK as the primary growth markets.
Elliott didn't manage the US push from Melbourne. He moved. He packed up his family and relocated to San Francisco, the operational center of gravity for the North American tech market. It's the kind of commitment that signals something more than a sales strategy - it's a statement that this is where the next chapter of the company gets written.
The platform, now rebranded as Breadcrumb (dropping the "1" to simplify for international markets), runs on a stack that includes Procore, Angular, React, Kubernetes, and AI integrations. The technology choices matter because they determine which construction firms can plug in without rebuilding their workflows.
This is a really exciting step for our company. Not only does it strengthen our role as the dominant platform for commercial construction companies dealing with complex regulations, but it will also drive continued expansion for our product globally.
- Simon Elliott, on acquiring SignOnSite, May 2025Buying the competition: the SignOnSite acquisition
In May 2025, Elliott made the kind of move that reshapes a market: Breadcrumb acquired SignOnSite, its direct competitor of four years, in a $4.5 million deal. SignOnSite had been operating since 2013 - more than a decade older than 1Breadcrumb. It had deep roots in the ANZ construction market and a 16-person team with serious domain expertise.
The acquisition expanded Breadcrumb's team from roughly 48 to 64 employees. Most of SignOnSite's team joined the combined company. SignOnSite CEO Alexandria Garlan moved into the role of Chief Commercial Officer for the merged entity, with Elliott continuing as CEO.
The result: one dominant platform across Australia, New Zealand, and beyond - instead of two companies splitting the attention of the same construction firms. The competitive energy that had been spent differentiating from each other could now be redirected toward the global market.
Career Timeline
Previous Roles
The technology stack behind Breadcrumb
Construction tech sounds unglamorous. The stack underneath it is not. Breadcrumb runs on a modern architecture built for compliance-heavy, regulated industries - integrating with the tools construction firms already use.
The Procore integration is the strategic anchor. Procore is one of the most widely adopted platforms in commercial construction globally - meaning Breadcrumb doesn't need to replace the existing tech stack, it plugs into it. Safety and compliance data flows through the same interface contractors are already using. That's the kind of distribution advantage that takes years to build.
What makes him different
Most construction tech founders come from construction. Elliott came from health tech and government tech. That outsider angle gives him something that's hard to manufacture: he's never thought of paper-based processes as normal. Every clipboard he sees in a site office reads as a bug, not a feature.
He is also, unusually, both an operator and an investor. His years with Melbourne Angels mean he understands what institutional money looks for, what due diligence feels like from the other side, and how to tell a growth story that works for sophisticated capital. That combination - deep operating experience plus investor empathy - shows up in how Breadcrumb has been capitalized and positioned.
The relocation to San Francisco is perhaps the most legible signal of how seriously he takes the US opportunity. The Australian market is relatively small. The US construction market is the largest in the world. Elliott is not managing that from a 16-hour time zone difference.
Breadcrumb is a featured speaker at Sydney Build 2026 and Digital Construction Australia 2025 - positioned not as a vendor but as a thought leader in what construction safety technology is supposed to look like.