Fearless Adventures leads £300K investment round for London-based personal safety startup WalkSafe

Fearless Adventures has led a £300,000 investment round to grow London-based personal safety app, WalkSafe, whose usage soared to half a million downloads following the murders of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa.

The unique investment platform, from a trio of young entrepreneurs, will help the app grow and scale by not only injecting capital but also providing cutting-edge digital marketing support and talent sourcing. Though downloads are already growing rapidly, as Walksafe prepares a new version of its app, it will benefit from Fearless Adventures’ re-launch campaign. This will drive app installs and user acquisition at scale with key components including paid social, influencer partnerships, SEO, UX optimisation, and business intelligence.

Rachel McDonald, Managing Director, Fearless Adventures: “As a team at Fearless Adventures, we fundamentally believe in Emma’s vision for WalkSafe, that technology combined with police crime data can genuinely help save lives. The new tech already has national attention and we see this app becoming the leading personal safety service. Emma’s commitment and passion are infectious and made it a very easy investment decision for us. We’re excited to offer them access to high-quality talent and marketing expertise to really scale their business.”

The innovative and free-to-download app, WalkSafe, exists with the ambition of helping to make the world a safer place. The brainchild of 33-year-old Emma Kay, a female entrepreneur whose father was a policeman, it has a suite of clever tools to protect people. This includes regularly updated police crime data to show users where the recent crime hotspots are, so they can pick safe routes to walk home.

A surge in violent street crime around the country is driving downloads. The app’s clever features allow users to alert contacts if they’re feeling unsafe whilst walking and has already surpassed 500,000 downloads.

Emma Kay, Co-founder, WalkSafe: “I call WalkSafe the ‘app that shouldn’t have to exist’ as no woman should have to live in fear of violence or the threat of it when they walk from A to B. But, like countless women, I’ve experienced being groped, flashed at and harassed with no provocation. Thankfully, I have been able to turn that fear and danger into something useful. So I’m proud that our technology empowers women, and has quickly become the most popular trusted safety app. To help more women live without this fear, who better to partner with than Fearless? With their best-in-class support, we’ll build a global safety brand that harnesses technology to help save lives. The entrepreneurial team shares our strong values, and with multiple successes under their belt, are the best partner to help us achieve our ambitious goals.”

WalkSafe is the only safety app to use official police crimes statistics with a unique live map so users can see the most recent crimes wherever they are, empowering them to avoid crime hotspots if they can. Other features include HomeSafe and ‘Tap Safe’ which has been activated over 20,000 times in the last six months, alerting contacts if the user feels unsafe and a dead switch giving their exact last known location if their phone is deactivated.

Started in October, 2021 by a trio of the country’s brightest young entrepreneurs, David Newns, Dominic McGregor and Charlie Yates, Fearless Adventures uniquely offers their partner entrepreneurs three critically important areas of support: funding, marketing services, and talent. The founders believe this triple threat is the key to fast growth and more successful exits further down the line but isn’t currently offered under one roof elsewhere. Two-thirds of the businesses they support are female-founded.