A mechanical engineer and former senior leader in the Australian coal industry says a library of more than 3200 mining machines on a new app can drive vital communication in the industry and ultimately create attractive revenue opportunities for start-up, Torqn.
Founder and CEO Troy McDonald says seeking critical safety, maintenance and other advice on multi-million-dollar mining vehicles can be like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
New Torqn subscribers can tailor their user profiles to plug them into live information feeds linked to equipment they are working on or with, or have nominated. Initially, the feeds will be dominated by Australia-based user insights. But McDonald doesn’t see a similar platform anywhere else in the world and has trademarked the Torqn brand in nine countries in anticipation of future expansion.
He believes Torqn’s equipment-driven profile and search differentiator, and the design smarts behind the platform, can help the start-up enterprise build a social media channel with up to 60,000 early mining users and perhaps many times that number of future farming, forestry, construction, aviation and other sector community members.
A bunch of early investors are backing him and a former mining colleague, Brett Baker, to make a go of it. Torqn has raised A$3 million of private funding and McDonald says 2023 shapes as a time of heavy marketing and audience engagement.
“We’ve got a fair bit of marketing collateral that we’ve developed over the last six months ready to go for next year,” he told InvestMETS ahead of the formal launch of the Torqn app.
“We came up with a concept for Torqn about 18 months ago. I brought Brett on as the other major shareholder. He and I kicked seed funding in. We did all the prototype development and we set up the company; we put a shareholders’ agreement together and then we went out … last May and started the capital raise.
