When Safe Software crossed $100 million in annual revenue in 2025, it marked more than a financial milestone.

For founder and CEO Don Murray, it was validation of a philosophy the company has followed for more than three decades: build for customer value first, stay relentlessly relevant, and let growth follow.

“We never set out saying, ‘we want to be a $100 million company,’” Murray said in a recent conversation with Vancouver Tech Journal. “We’ve always focused on building a good company—looking after customers, looking after our people, and delivering real value. If you do that well, good things can happen.”

Safe Software, best known as the creator of FME, has long helped organizations move, transform, and operationalize complex data—especially spatial data. That positioning has become increasingly powerful as enterprises race to deploy AI.

“AI needs fuel, and that fuel is data,” Murray said. “If you can’t get data to the AI—or AI to the data—you simply can’t unlock its value.”

Rather than pushing customers toward a single proprietary model, Safe has doubled down on what they call an “All Data, Any AI” approach. Customers choose the AI tools that makes sense for them—whether that’s OpenAI, Google, Amazon, or a specialized industry model—and Safe ensures the data flows cleanly, securely, and at scale.

“That choice matters,” Murray said. “Different use cases, different data, different constraints. We don’t believe in forcing customers into one AI just because we own it.”

That flexibility is already translating into tangible outcomes. Murray pointed to a UK power utility that used FME with Google Gemini to analyze two million handwritten documents—at a cost of just a few hundred pounds in AI usage—to identify optimal locations for EV chargers.

“They didn’t need another AI pitch,” he said. “They needed a way to get messy, complex data into the AI they chose. That’s where we shine.”

As AI becomes increasingly multimodal—working across text, imagery, video, and 3D models—Safe’s ability to handle “all data types by default” has become a differentiator, particularly in sectors like local government and utilities, two of the company’s fastest-growing verticals.

While Safe is ramping its sales team and expanding internationally, Murray is clear about what actually drives revenue.

“The biggest lever is the product,” he said. “If the product genuinely helps organizations maximize the value of AI, everything else becomes easier.”

That philosophy appears to be resonating. Safe reported that its most recent quarter saw revenue jump 38% year over year—well above its historical growth rate of roughly 15%.

“That ‘any AI, all data’ message is landing,” Murray said. “It’s cutting through a lot of the noise in the market.”

Internally, Safe has embraced AI aggressively, with hundreds of custom GPTs in use across the company and a mandate that every team experiment with AI-enabled workflows. But Murray is cautious about the narrative that AI replaces people.

“AI is a great assistant—but it needs an authority,” he said. “Experienced people get more value out of AI than junior ones, because they know what to trust and what to challenge.”

He expects some companies that loudly touted AI-driven layoffs to quietly reverse course in 2026.

“You still need people who know what they’re doing,” he said. “AI without human judgment isn’t that great.”

Even as Safe expands hiring across Canada, the UK, and the EU, Murray says the company’s roots are staying put.

“The headquarters will remain in Canada,” he said. “It’s where the company grew up, and there’s no plan—none—to change that.”

For a Canadian tech company navigating global scale amid an AI boom, Safe’s trajectory offers a counterpoint to the idea that growth requires relocation—or sacrificing workforce growth in the name of automation.

As Murray puts it: “We’re using AI to multiply people, not replace them.”