Aussie start-up banks $15m to build AI workers

Three-year-old start-up Relevance AI has followed up a $US3 million funding round in 2021 with a $15 million ($US9.9 million) round led by AI specialist VC, King River Capital.

Other investors included Peak XV’s Surge, Galileo Ventures and previous investor, Insight Partners.

The company - which was founded by three high school friends - said its funding would be used for international expansion, with plans to open an office in San Francisco in 2024.

The company’s software is designed to help companies build teams of customised artificial intelligence agents, and it claims that 6000 companies have signed up over the last three months, to automate tasks like answering customer inquiries, managing outbound sales, or conducting market research.

“Relevance AI unlocks this new technology’s true potential through the use of pre-built components and visual interfaces that help anyone create and manage AI teams from scratch, supercharging employee productivity. It’s a game changer,” Zeb Rice, co-founder of lead investor King River Capital said in a statement.

Property tech company Blockbuilder has raised $2 million and is looking for another $2 million to launch its cashless deposit platform in the United Kingdom and United States.

Blockbuilder is the owner of Downsizer.com, a platform that allows retirees to purchase property without a deposit using equity in their existing property.

Investor Correlation Australia Holdings has committed $2 million to lead Blockbuilder’s latest raise, after backing the company’s $3.75 million seed round earlier this year.

Blockbuilder was founded by Mark Macduffie, a former Commonwealth Bank executive director of business and institutional digital banking.

“We’ve just signed an agreement with a global insurer to bring Downsizer into the UK which we’ve identified as being a key market for older homeowners looking to move to smaller property,” Mr Macduffie said.

Blackbird Ventures is the lead investor in a $4.15 million funding round for Sydney-based Clove, a start-up turning the power of AI on to cooking and meal planning.

Founded by ex-Canva staffers Anna Guerrero and Sam Killin, it has banked the money before its site is live, and is now hoping users and content creators sign up to show off their culinary creations.

Along with Blackbird, money has come in from investment firm Shakti, and individual executives and start-up founders from companies including Canva, Pexels and Google Maps.

In an announcement, the company said its technology takes the hassle out of cooking by allowing users to browse personalised recipes and simplify cooking workflows with artificial intelligence. It says this includes deciding how to use up the remaining ingredients in your fridge, or how to create a week-long meal plan around various dietary requirements.

It is hoping to become a home for content creators away from the likes of TikTok and Instagram.

Sydney-based image generation start-up Leonardo Ai has closed a $US23.5 million ($36m) series A funding round led by Blackbird Ventures.

The company has enjoyed explosive user growth, leading to significant competition in the local VC sector to get on board. Investing alongside Blackbird was Australian firm Side Stage Ventures, China’s Gaorong Capital and US-based Smash Capital.

The round follows an earlier unreported $US7.5 million seed round, taking its total funding so far to $US31 million.

The company declined to disclose its valuation, though one source familiar with the company put it at about $US80 million after the investment.

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The Queensland government’s $100 million Business Investment Fund has joined a $5.5 million funding round for cloud data operations start-up Dataweavers.

The government invested via QIC, alongside the round’s leader, Five V Capital and OIF Ventures.

Dataweavers offers tools to help companies deliver and measure users’ experiences on their websites.

Queensland Treasurer Cameron Dick said the funding would help Dataweavers hire twenty people in the state and sell its products to large clients, which already include Toyota and Rio Tinto.

Dataweavers chief executive Ben Shapiro, who did not disclose revenue figures or a valuation, said in a statement that the funding would ramp up his business.

“We were fortunate to work with a number of US companies throughout the pandemic, but now we have the confidence and capital to really dive in and offer our solutions to a broader client pool,” Mr Shapiro said.

It previously announced a $5 million raise last year.

Vantari VR, a start-up founded by two doctors to use virtual reality to train medical professionals how to perform procedures, has raised $7 million from local investors.

The start-up was founded in late 2017 by Dr Vijay Paul and Dr Nishanth Krishnananthan who met on their first day as interns at a Sydney hospital.

After a decade in medicine, the co-CEOs tried their luck as entrepreneurs, first in 2016 with an unsuccessful social media site for doctors called DocLife, and later launching Vantari VR.

Similar to a flight simulator, Vantari helps clinicians, nurses and students practise life-saving medical procedures in a VR environment before performing them on real patients. The technology is used in tertiary training hospitals including Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and Westmead Hospital in NSW, Fiona Stanley Hospital in WA and Latrobe Regional Hospital in Victoria.

The $7 million investment, dubbed a ‘pre-series A’ round, was led by Co:Act Capital and supported by Acova Capital, Significant Early Venture Capital, Sirius Capital and other investors from the medical device and insurance sector.

The company plans to use the cash to expand in the US, doubling the growth of its technology and operational team.

Arkeus, an ambitious Melbourne start-up that has secured early contracts with the Defence Department for its automated optical technology that lets users see much more than is possible with the human eye, has closed a $4.45 million funding round.

The round was led by the CSIRO-backed venture capital firm Main Sequence Ventures. VC firms including Steve Baxter’s recently formed Beaten Zone Ventures and Salus Ventures also invested.

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Westpac has backed Sydney-based Rich Data Co, an eight-year-old fintech start-up, in a $28 million in a Series B round.

The round is also led by US cloud banking provider nCino, and contains money from pre-existing backers BMYG and new investment from Singapore-based Octava Fund.

The company uses artificial intelligence to make decisions about whether to lend to small businesses, and is Westpac’s largest move into venture capital this year. For the full story click here.

Nexl, which makes software for lawyers to manage their clients, has raised $6 million from investors, in a deal that values the company at $31 million, after doubling its annual recurring revenue.

Founded in 2019 by Gilbert + Tobin’s former head of innovation Philipp Thurner, Nexl was originally pitched as “LinkedIn for lawyers” but pivoted after the initial plan failed to find enough paying customers.

Close to running out of cash, in 2021 Nexl started from scratch and built a customer relationship management (CRM) platform specifically designed for law firms.

The company has landed contracts with large law firms like MinterEllison and Gilbert + Tobin and generated $2.2 million in revenue last financial year. Nexl is approaching $4 million in annual recurring revenue, Mr Thurner said.

“Law firms have been quite cash rich over the last couple of years, and now they are looking to use data to improve their relationship with clients,” Mt Thurner said.

Nexl’s software connects to an email account and automatically populates its database with contacts and their relationships. The software also includes a collaboration platform where lawyers across a firm can work on projects together.

The latest round comes just six months after the company raised $4 million and was led by Shearwater Capital, with participation from returning investors EVP.

Mr Thurner said Nexl plans to use the cash to “slow down” and be more strategic about growing the business in Australia, Europe and the United States.

“EVP and Shearwater both said: you’ve raised a lot of money and that buys you a lot of time, so you can actually slow down a little bit and figure things out,” he said.

“We’ve grown globally so quickly but we’ve gone after low hanging fruit in lots of different countries. Now it’s really time for us to start preparing the business for proper scale.”

Happenco, an Australian venture capital fund, which has already made a number of pre-seed investments has officially closed its first fund at $12 million.

The fund promises to target its investments at the earliest stage of a start-ups life, offering advisory services as well as capital to founders.

The investor is led by former McKinsey consultant and start-up founder Gideon Gut-Silverman, former Deloitte Ventures investor Ben Cheyne and Omar Varts, who are all involved with e-commerce start-up Awayco.

In a statement Happenco said it is backed by investors including former McKinsey managing partner Michael Rennie, Jeeva Suresh of venture studio Helix Collective, and a number of family offices.

It has already deployed 60 per cent of the $12 million raised across 16 companies including Neara, an electric utility software company, The Spec Sheet, an online hub for managing ad specs, and EdTripper, a platform for schools to uncover their next excursion.