Last month we took a deep dive into the 40 Melbourne Startups to Watch 2017. This month we’re turning the spotlight onto Sydney; our Aussie city most accustomed to soaking up the accolades and with good reason.
For each startup, we looked at launch, funding, size, product and of course the founders and decided to chuck in another 10, just for good measure. Here they are:
Veromo
Veromo is a platform to get your business off to the ground by streamlining and automating most of the setup process of starting a business. Veromo was born through creating a positive solution to counter a frustrating experience faced by Founder’s Luscheyne Mellon and Andy Giles when setting up their first business together. While the world had become more connected the process for starting a business was still fragmented. Veromo have now created an affordable self-serve platform that helps new business owners start their business in a fraction of the time. Their first round of funding circa $935k helped to get their MVP to market. They’ve just kicked off a new cap raise Series A, seeking further investment to progress their product ecosystem. From here Luscheyne and Andy have their sights set on providing a fully integrated, one-stop digital solution for SMEs to launch a business from anywhere in the world.
Sprout Stack
Sprout Stack is revolutionising how fresh produce is grown and distributed, without compromising the environment. The Sprout Stack team have achieved this by using vertical hydroponics in a highly controlled environment called the Sprout Stack Farm; a modular, location agnostic and highly automated hydroponic farm. They are built using insulated shipping containers, which allows us to precisely control the environment inside. This results in year-round, chemical free, locally grown fresh produce. Founders Francisco Caffarena & Michael Harder have built 3 fully functional Farms, with their own IoT automation system, that will enter production progressively over the coming months. Already Sprout Stack are supplying fresh produce to local restaurants and shops in Sydney’s North Shore. They are also in conversations to appoint their first third party operators and planning expansion to other cities in Australia.
Uno Home Loans
Uno Home Loans is the first platform to help you search, compare and settle a home loan all in one place with as much or as little help as you need from a team of experts. Uno imagines a world where people can connect their bank accounts, upload some documents and in a matter of seconds are presented with the best options for their current and future needs, with complete visibility to everything on offer. Founder Vincent Turner has over 15 years experience as a fintech entrepreneur. His first company, Pisces, built mortgage software used by over 90% of Australian banks, processing $50bn/year in mortgages. His latest venture, Uuno, is Australia’s first digital mortgage service. Launched mid-2016 Uno has recently secured $16.5m investment from Westpac. They have been growing 30% month on month since their launch, gone from zero to 38 staff and expect to double that by the end of 2018.
Persollo
Persollo is the world’s first platform for targeted social selling powered by data and AI. The platform allows brands and influencers to convert social and digital media engagement into sales in less than 15 seconds. Designed for social media and mobile, Persollo’s single-page checkout allows click through payments straight from any social network and through the key influencers. Founded by Olga Oleinikova and Kyrylo Medvediev in late 2015, Persollo has helped 700+ businesses across 16 countries to increase their conversion to a brag-worthy 300% from social media. Those clients include the likes of New Balance, Australian UGGs Original, HotelsCombined and Marie Claire. Backed by Telstra’s muru-d, Persollo is gaining huge credibility and has been noticed as an Australian startup to watch by the Australia Herald, winner of Visa™ People’s ChoiceAward, “The Everywhere Initiative” and they’re being featured on Channel 7’s Dream Academy.
INAMO
INAMO develops wearable products, including waterproof accessories, wristbands and key-rings, that double as a contactless prepaid bank card to make life more convenient for consumers when making contactless payments. Founder & CEO Peter Colbert, is on a mission to free you from your wallet & looks to the day that INAMO’s customers will be able to use their wearable products to catch public transport, access buildings, as ticketing for festivals, and even your gym membership. In May 2017 the company announced a successful seed funding round of $1.5 million led by Club Investible & private investors.
The Yield
The Yield is an AgTech solutions company which develops IoT-based solutions for agriculture and aquaculture. They’re on a mission to transform food and farming practices by building safe, scalable digital technology. The Yield’s end-to-end technology Sensing+ combines farm sensors, data, predictions and apps for growers. Founder Ros Harvey is an experienced entrepreneur who is passionate about utilising technology to play a role in the sustainable governance of the planet. Since launch in 2014, their first product Sensing+ has won numerous awards, including four at the TasICT Awards, two at the IoT Hub Awards and being named finalist in the Microsoft World Partner Awards. In April this year, the team announced a successful Series A funding round of $6.5 million, with significant investment from global corporations Bosch, KPMG and AgFunder. This funding takes investment in the company to $11.5 million in two years.
Pennybox
Pennybox is an app that teaches kids about money, banking and finance in a fun, practical and highly gamified way. The platform uses the traditional ‘pocket money’ concept as the entry point to engage kids and parents on skills related to money from an early age. The goal being to empower kids to learn real-life money concepts such as budgeting, setting savings goals, negotiating, banking, interest, and debt. Before Pennybox, Co-Founder Reji Eapan was a finance analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and UBS. The second half of Pennybox, Co-Founder Adam Naor, left a 7 year career with Google to combine his passion of finance and tech. To date they have raised 250k from external investors and won the NSW MVP grant. Pennybox has had 5,000 families join the private beta and they are scheduled to launch to the public early July.
Mad Paws
Mad Paws was created to fill in the ever growing need in the pet boarding market for affordable, and local pet accommodation whilst still maintaining the care, love, and attention pets received at high-end, expensive, pet boarding services. It’s pet minding for the share economy. Founder Alexis Soulopoulos founded Mad Paws after graduating from University of Sydney Business School. After just eight months of operation, the startup raised its first venture capital round of $1.1 million to further accelerate its growth. Mad Paws is now Australia’s number one pet services marketplace and is expanding fast. The platform has over 150,000 pet owners on board and secured themselves a partnership with PETstock and Bondi Vet.
HIVERY
HIVERY build prescriptive analytics tools, leveraging data using AI and Machine Learning to find new humanly impossible patterns that drive new profits. HIVERY was born following a big data hackathon that brought together Franki Chamaki and Jason Hosking, serial entrepreneurs from the Coca-Cola Founders platform, and Charles Gretton, Matthew Robards, and Menkes van den Briel, data scientists with backgrounds in AI and Operations Research. In its latest incarnation, the data-driven platform is planning optimal retail strategies around occasion, brand, package, price, and channel. It is optimising the scheduling of promotions and eliciting meaningful customer segments on the back of e-commerce platforms. The team at HIVERY plan to continue to develop AI SaaS products in the retail and FMGCs space, as well as set up offices in USA and Japan as the majority of the company’s revenue is already in these markets.
HashChing
HashChing is Australia’s first online home loans marketplace that instantly connects borrowers to verified local mortgage brokers registered on HashChing using an AI driven algorithm. HashChing has been created to empower people to share their grievance or positive experience and make an informed decision when choosing a financial product, in a simple and convenient manner. Founded in 2015 by Atul Narang and Mandeep Sodhi, HashChing has already gained great traction receiving over $7 billion worth of home loan applications, $6 billion of that in last 12 months alone. Moving forward HashChing’s target is to have 1,000 active mortgage brokers on the platform and $20 billion worth of home loan applications by January 2018. They are due to announce other partnerships in the coming months that will completely streamline the end-to-end home loan process.
Soapbox.ai
Soapbox is developing the first Intelligent Customer Service Platform leveraging leading edge Machine Learning and NLP. The group have released Sofi, an Intelligent Virtual Agent that adds intelligent automation to existing customer service and support platforms. Sofi engages with customers through an omni-channel conversational interaction to resolve customer issues without human intervention. Founded by Dion Williams and Paul Heath, Soapbox was born from the observation that customer service organisations are under increasing pressure to reduce operating costs whilst maintaining high levels of customer service. Their mission is to work with customers and enable them to deliver a better service experience whilst improving operational efficiency and increasing productivity.
CurrencyVue
CurrencyVue helps mid-sized businesses understand their FX exposure by integrating major ERP systems into their platform, allowing their customers to manage invoices and orders from a single location with all the information they need right there. Established in 2015 by Matt Tyrrell, CurrencyVue emerged from the realisation that there were no available products that helped businesses collate FX payments and hedging in a simple and easy to use platform. Their innovation in this sector has quickly gained them the support of high profile investors and advisors. In August 2016, CurrencyVue launched their MVP. Using feedback from beta customers they decided to enter another period of product development. They have signed an integration partnership with OFX (previously Ozforex), closed their Seed Investment round in March 2017 and have employed a development team getting ready to relaunching in September 2017.
BRiN
BRiN is the world’s first artificially intelligent business advisor & she’s able to provide support to millions of clients simultaneously. Founder Dale Beaumont, entrepreneur, author, speaker and businesses advisor, wanted to make education accessible, and support instantaneous to millions of business owners around the world. BRiN is a smartphone app that uses the power of AI to help you find information relevant to your business. In April 2017, Dale and his team released the next generation of BRiN, which knows the answer to more than 5,000 commonly asked business questions. All you need to do is type or speak your question and you’ll get back an answer from BRiN, instantly. The app has been praised by Forbes, Huffington Post, Business Insider, Gizmodo, The Next Web, GQ and Sky Business. You can find BRiN on the App store or Google Play.
CoVentured
CoVentured is a platform designed to connect Startups and Corporates. Founded by the team behind Australian corporate accelerator, Slingshot, CoVentured was created to bridge the gap between corporates looking to explore the innovation of startups and startups looking to leverage the credibility and client base of corporates. CoVentured is a communication platform which allows both startups and corporates to create profiles and more easily find and understand one another. General Manager Nick Dunford and Slingshot CEO Karen Lawson officially launched the platform just a few weeks ago with 2000 startups and 25 corporates on board. Corporate clients include the likes of Westpac, Woolworths, Lendlease and Australia Post. CoVentured aim to be the obvious first step for corporates and startups looking to connect with the other side.
Leezair
Leezair creates apps and integrations that allow people to experience their surroundings more often and more conveniently. Born out of frustration, as most great platforms are, the concept came to Founder Enguerrand Vidor (a.k.a. Angus), when he was travelling in the Philippines. Frustrated with the difficulty of trying to book scuba diving, Angus realized that the entire activities market wasn’t meeting consumer needs for a mobile app that enabled last minute bookings in real time. Leezair aims to inspire adventure and encourage freedom through personalisation. The app suggests adventures that are tailored to any condition, so you can discover the world around you without limitations. The team are now a proud participant of the Qantas AVRO accelerator program which is bringing them great traction to continue to launch new features to make people’s everyday extraordinary.
Flare HR
Flare is Australia’s first all-in-one HR and Employee Benefits platform, which is completely free. Flare HR manages all of your HR needs from digital onboarding, connecting to payroll, leave management, performance reviews and more. Plus it gives your employees access to employee benefits that are typically enjoyed only by the largest companies. This includes completely transparent choice of superannuation allocation and super consolidation, 2000 retails discounts, access to the best rates of life insurance and health insurance, cheaper mobile phone plans, novated car leasing, etc. Founded by Jan Pacas, Daniel Cohen, Saul Kaplan and Colin Mierowsky, Flare has signed up over 30,000 employees in its first year and has received initial seed investment Reinventure Group.
Spacer
Spacer is Australia’s marketplace for space. This platform offers a Peer-to-Peer Marketplace for Self Storage, linking Hosts with Renters. Founded in 2015 by Mike Rosenbaum and Roland Tam, the platform provides an efficient and more cost effective self-storage solution for your boat, car, caravan, furniture and household goods, in a secure environment for all users. The team secured $1 million funding early on in the piece and in March 2017 they announced the acquisition of US based Roost as part of their strategy to tap into a $27 billion US market.
Grassrootz
Grassrootz helps ‘for purpose’ organisations raise more funds and reduce their cost of fundraising. Grassrootz was founded by Ben Graetz and Angela Dunn due to their frustrations with the limitations of existing software products available to raise money online. Turning frustration into solution, they built their own online fundraising platform. The result is Grassrootz, a fundraising platform optimised for mobile, with low transaction fees, helping charities to maximise fundraising in the modern world. Grassrootz offers charities the brand control of a custom build – without the expense – which has lead to fast adoption by charities such as St Vincent de Paul, Starlight, Cure Brain Cancer, and the Cancer Council. Within their first six months, Grassrootz was awarded the contract to be the exclusive online fundraising solution for the Blackmores Sydney Running Festival, which has over 33,000 participants annually.
Sonder Design
Sonder Design have created a world first dynamic E Ink keyboard which features 50 customisable keys for all your design, technology, editing and gaming needs. With app-specific layouts on the keys for all your applications, Sonder’s keyboard will intuitively swap between layouts. You can create macros and hotkeys and switch between languages. Sonder was founded by twin brothers Francisco and Felipe Serra-Martins in 2015. The company has offices in Sydney, Hong Kong and Taipei. The keyboard is due to start shipping late 2017.
Loan Dolphin
LoanDolphin is a loan bidding marketplace where banks and brokers compete to win your Home Loan. Founders Ranin Mendis and Rod Dutra met while working in a ‘Big 4’ bank. Witnessing the hassle and frustration customers experienced with securing loans, the pair were motivated to change the process, making it transparent and fair to ensure customers received convenient access to the right loan. LoanDolphin is a truly customer-centric digital loan service that helps it’s customers easily and effortlessly find market-leading interest rates. They are not affiliated with any one bank or mortgage broker and remain focused on creating a transparent financial marketplace for all Australians. In November 2016 the team successfully raised $1.1 million from investors to expand their presence in major capital cities. They have since been valued at $5 million post capital raising rounds and been selected to join the Qantas Avro scaleup program powered by Slingshot.
Audience Republic
Audience Republic is a marketing platform for events, helping organisers sell more tickets. Founded by Jared Kristensen, Audience Republic power the marketing for events worldwide, including Justin Bieber, Bruce Springsteen, Sticky Fingers, Broods and Rufus, to name a few. Event organisers simply setup campaigns which leverage social media & rewards to incentivize fans to invite their friends to purchase tickets, integrating with existing ticketing providers like Eventbrite or Ticketmaster. In February 2017 the team announced they closed a $525,000 seed investment round to continue to enhance the platform.
Camplify
Camplify is Australia’s leading peer-to-peer RV sharing platform connecting people wanting to hire caravans, motorhomes, campervans, and camper trailers with RV owners in a peer-to-peer sharing environment. In November 2014, Founder Justin Hales and his wife noticed all of the RVs sitting on lawns in his area doing nothing for the majority of the year. As avid campers without the equipment, Justin had a light bulb moment and just 10 days later Camplify was launched. Similar to an AirBNB model, Camplify allows aspiring campers who lack the equipment, the ability to go on holidays using other people’s RVs. Camplify got their start through the NRMA Jumpstart program. In June 2015 the team secured $625,000 in funding from investors including VC’s and the NRMA and February 2017 the team secured a further $1.9 million in funding from investors including VC’s and Apollo Tourism and Leisure (ASX: ATL). The team have also just announced their expansion into the UK on the 3rd July 2017.
Spaceship
Spaceship is a web-based application that that enables Australians to invest their super into tech companies such as Apple, Google, Uber, Tesla, and more. As these stories tend to go, the idea for Spaceship came from the founders own personal frustrations with the financial services industry. Founded in 2016 by Kaushik Sen, Andrew Sellen, and Dave Kuhn, Spaceship will give Australians the opportunity to have more control of their super and to invest it in an area that they are passionate about. In September 2016 the team successfully closed $1.6 million from high profile investors including Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes.
Splend
Splend is Australia’s preferred supplier of vehicles for on-demand rideshare and delivery services such as Uber and UberEATS. They provide brand new vehicles on a vehicle-as-a-subscription service. Founded in 2015 by Chris King, Splend seeks to create the opportunity for people to become their own boss by using Splend’s vehicle platform, training and mentoring team. Their mission is to help Splend Members to become more profitable, safer and happier drivers. In February 2017 Splend announced a $3 million strategic equity investment from Investec to expand their fleet of cars from 1300 to 4000 in Australia. Following successful expansion across Australia, the team will then set their sights on New Zealand, North America, European and other overseas markets.
Marketlend
Marketlend is a peer to peer lending platform to small and medium enterprises that offers investors secure and robust investment in business with loss protection and insurance. Investors buy a tradeable note that secures part or all of the loan, and it is managed by a trust manager with the trustee handling all cash collections. Founder Leo Tyndall launched Marketlend in 2014 after an extensive career in financial services industry involved with the likes of UniCredit, NAB and RAMS Home Loans. In June 2016 the team announced that it has closed a $1 million investment round led by Jon Barlow, who has been appointed as a non-executive member of Marketlend’s board of directors.
Muru Music
Muru is the world’s first Artificial Intelligence DJ Brain. Muru has combined AI with deep learning and the fundamentals of DJ-ing to create the first automated song classification engine, that can classify a song in under 5 seconds with 99% accuracy. Part of the solution is a smart playlist generating app that works on top of existing streaming services like Spotify premium and allows you to create a playlist of up to 6 hours in a matter of seconds. You can nudge by tempo, energy, popularity or even era to automagically find your perfect set of songs for every occasion. Founder, Nicc Carter-Johnson, who has also been a professional DJ for 16-years, including a 7-year residency at Pacha Ibiza – initially came up with the idea while consulting to hospitality venues. Although a b2b technology company, Muru’s mission is to become the industry standard for song classification and provide the tools for the digital music industry to really thrive.
Morse Micro
Morse Micro is a fabless semiconductor startup developing Wi-Fi HaLow chips for the Internet of Things market which are 5x smaller & cheaper, 10x longer range and 200x lower power than conventional Wi-Fi chips. It is WiFi re-invented for IoT. Founded in 2016 by Michael De Nil and Andy Terry, experienced ex-Broadcom Wi-Fi engineers; Morse Micro’s mission is to enable the multi-billion device IoT market with its low power Wi-Fi HaLow chips. 2017 is shaping up to be a great year for the team. In January they announced that they had been taken on by startup accelerator Startmate. April saw them joined forces with Wi-Fi Alliance. Then in June the team received a government grant of over $400,000 as well as sending off the design for their first test chip.
Sound Scouts
Sound Scouts is a game designed to test the hearing of children. They have taken the science of a hearing test, embedded it into a mobile game that allows them to collect data and continually improve their offering. Founder Carolyn Mee, understanding that hearing issues impact learning, hopes that Sound Scouts will eventually be adopted by the government to provide cost effective hearing screening to all Australian children. It can pick up undiagnosed hearing issues that may affect a child’s social or academic development. They are now working with teams at the University of Southampton and the University of South Florida on localised version for the UK and US. They’re also finalising a Mandarin version which they are looking to begin trialling in Australia in August.In March 2017 Sound Scouts were announced a winner of the SXSW Accelerator Pitch Event in the Health and Wearables category.
Easyshare
Easyshare is an online platform for paying rent and bills. Housemates can set up their own individual payment method and easyshare takes care of the rest. The platform will collect rent from each housemate and pay the total to the property manager or landlord. Easyshare also take care of splitting bills, tracking shared expenses and helping with shared savings. Payment options are flexible with the ability to pay via bank transfer or credit card. Founded in 2014 by John Bush, easyshare has already helped customers to pay over $10 million worth of rent and bills.
Cover Genius
Cover Genius is the parent company of RentalCover.com and BrightWrite. It is one of the fastest growing Insurtech startups globally. The company was founded in 2014 by Chris Bayley and Angus McDonald, former leaders from Google and Yahoo respectively. RentalCover.com is a global distributor of car rental insurance that partners with online travel agents worldwide. RentalCover.com’s price and product technology is served by BrightWrite. BrightWrite is a platform to distribute multiple lines of insurance that optimizes price, product and promotion & provides complementary risk analytics via the application of patented Data Science technology. It uses a combination of Machine Learning and AI to optimize the yield derived from the sale of insurance on the websites of distributors and the direct B2C channels of its underwriting partners. To date Cover Genius has raised $1.5 million in seed investment and has offices in Austin, TX, London and Sydney, Australia.
Simpla
Simpla is a tool for developers that makes building and editing web content easier. Founders Sean King and Bede Overend created Simpla to allow developers to edit content seamlessly inline, build websites ten times faster and simply create awesome things. It is a modular content framework built on Web Components allowing users to create dynamic content with HTML, edit it inline, and manage it via a JSON API. As a modular, open ecosystem of components, developers can use the ones they need as building blocks for their own content system. The original version was launched late 2015 and in April 2017 the team have announced the launch of Simpla 2. The goal for Simpla 2 is to open up the element ecosystem, so developers can build their own Simpla elements and contribute them back to the community.
Ordermentum
Ordermentum is a web-based ordering and payments platform for the food and beverage industry. For Retailers, it is one tool for all ordering and payments in one easy to use mobile experience. Founded by seasoned tech and F&B professionals Adam Theobald and Andrew Low, Ordermentum was created to solve the F&B industries problem when it comes to collecting orders and chasing payments. It is a two sided network allowing retailers to order from all suppliers and for suppliers to grow brand engagement, eliminate all data entry and offer insights through data. Since their launch in 2014, the platform has grown to service over 140 suppliers and 6000 bars, restaurants and cafes using their platform every month. With a team of 19 staff they are looking to scale quickly and achieve their objective of powering the food & beverage industry.
Tyde
Tyde is a unique platform that transforms the connection between patients and clinicians. Founders Tom Synnott, Sudeep Gohil, Shamus Cooper and Romain Bonjean are working on bridging the gap between clinicians, patients and their Electronic Health Records. The team have built the first commercially available application that seamlessly, securely and intelligently accesses the Federal government’s MyHealthRecord initiative. By combining health data sources in a centralised place, providing access to you and your health care team, they are shifting the focus to patients and creating a new era of health engagement for Australians.
Valiant Finance
Valiant is Australia’s leading business loan marketplace which enables business owners and their advisers to get tailored business loan options and advice in a matter of minutes. Founders Alex Molloy and Ritchie Cotton are on a mission to help Australian business owners make sense of the madness and empower them with transparency and choice when it comes to business finance. Their proprietary technology gives business owners the ability to explore products from a universe of over 60 lenders and get matched to the lenders that they have the highest probability of being funded by. Valiant currently offers products from lenders that cover the entire spectrum from short-term working capital lenders to the Big 4 banks. They have raised $800,000 in investment.
LayAway Travel
LayAway Travel Australia is an online travel company specialising in lay-by holidays. LayAway Travel have developed an online booking process specifically for lay-by, so customers can choose their destination and then budget weekly, fortnightly or monthly payments, which are deducted automatically. Founder Andrew Paykel, formerly COO of Fisher & Paykel, believes in giving customers control of their personal financial outcomes and holiday lay-by is opening the door for all Australian’s to travel. Their customised lay-by payment platform is available for White Label applications and provides front end and back office support. In the 18 months since the venture started more than $1 million of capital has been raised and they have sparked the interest of both Jetstar and Qantas. Plans are in place to expand into other countries.
Yello
Yello is revolutionising the way takeaway deliveries are managed. Building a better driver search and delivery management system for the foodservice industry. Providing opportunities for drivers and solving problems for cafe and restaurant owners. Delivering tools and information to help store owners manage and analyse their delivery service and drivers manage their time and business. Yello is a marketplace that helps restaurants find, manage, book, train and pay drivers and helps drivers manage & grow their business. Founded by Steve Fanale and Johnny Timbs, Yello is a complete driver engagement platform. In October 2016 the team announced their partnership with Menulog to enable restaurants without drivers to offer food delivery and tap into their food tracking tech.
HiveUAV
Hive is a mobile solution for the remote operation of UAVs or drones. Hive enables automated take-off, landing, data transfer and charging of drones that can be located just about anywhere. Founders Dr Chris Renton and Ilche Vojdanoski have a vision to see HiveUAV enabling drones to fly autonomously and complete missions on a large scale. The business is focused on enabling industries such as mining, construction, agriculture, security and oil and gas to improve costs, safety and efficiency by gathering and interpreting data and analytics, powered by drones. In 2015 they were chosen for NRMA’s Jumpstart program, an initiative looking to help startups scale by tapping into the NRMA’s 2.4 million customers as well as being awarded a $19,000 Entrepreneurs grant by Beyond Bank and in 2016 they participated in the River Program, hosted by Rothenberg Ventures in San Francisco.
Ignition Wealth
Ignition Wealth provides online investment and superannuation advice solutions for the Australian financial services market. Founded in 2014 by Mike Giles and Mark Fordree, Ignition Wealth provides automated advice, tools and calculators to Australian professional financial businesses and financial institutions. In its most simple form the Ignition Wealth technology is an off the shelf, easy to use solution which is targeted at professional financial businesses including advice practices and accountancy firms. They are Australia’s largest robo-advice specialist. So far the team have successfully raised $4 million to help expand and grow out their offering.
Tapview
Tapview provides micro payment services that are easy for the provider to integrate and easy for the customer to pay. It is an easy way to convert your readers into paying customers. Founders James Jansson, Alexey Feigin and Jordan Rastrick believe that paying for content online is currently broken. Tapview is a “read more” button with a small payment attached. A user can click this button to access content on any website that has Tapview integrated, spending from a single balance across all sites – a pay once, consume many times model. It works on all modern desktop and mobile browsers and does not require the user to install an app or a browser plugin. Their white-label offering has been integrated into two Fairfax papers and received $100,000 seed funding in 2016.
Huddle
Huddle Insurance has turned what is usually considered a grudge purchase, into an exciting way to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, by combining the power of technology with a purpose-led business model. Huddle is a financial services company that offers car and travel insurance. Huddle was launched in 2016, after Founders, Jason Wilby and Jonathan Buck, raised $6 million to redefine the insurance industry. Already their travel and car insurance are shaking up the market, attracting customers away from the major insurance players. Their Instant Claims™ technology makes it possible for their clients to complete a claim in minutes on any device. What’s more, each year, once claims have been paid, surplus profits are donated to a “Huddle” of each customer’s choice. Each Huddle is a not-for-profit or community group working hard to fight poverty, inequality or climate change.
Nano-X
Nano-X is an innovative cancer treatment system being designed and developed in Australia. Nano-X will change the delivery of radiation therapy from large reference centres to small-town hospitals. An advanced on-board imaging/planning system captures 3D images in real-time, controls the radiation beam, and automatically delivers the right amount of energy to the right tissue, requires fewer dedicated staff. Founded by Ilana Feain and Paul Keall, Nano-X simplifies radiation therapy by moving radiation therapy system complexity from hardware to software. To date the team have received a $2.5 million grant to continue their work.
Equitise
Equitise offers an equity crowdfunding platform for private investors to invest in early-stage companies and startups. Founded 2014 by Chris Gilbert, Jonathon Wilkinson and Panche Gjorgjevski, Equitise is a trans-Tasman investment platform. They bring together the Australasian investment network, providing a platform for high growth and innovative companies to partner with investors who believe in them. Equitise is backed by Investec, AWI, H2 Ventures, Tank Stream Ventures, BridgeLane Capital and well-known Angels. They are creating an intuitive and automated investment ecosystem which is highly social and inclusive for all investors.
Incent Loyalty
Incent promise to be the future of loyalty, harnessing the blockchain to turbocharge merchant revenue in a way that traditional schemes cannot. Because Incent is a digital asset reward, merchants can outsource infrastructure costs and liabilities to the blockchain, while the consumer is rewarded for their custom instantly, with an incentive that has intrinsic value. Founded by Rob Wilson in 2016, Incent is the first universal merchant-backed loyalty platform. It’s better loyalty through smarter rewards. It was announced in November 2016 that the team have raised over 1 million in seed funding.
Hyper Anna
Hyper Anna is your personal AI powered data analyst. Hyper Anna helps organisations get closer to their data by serving sculpted insights to their employees. She will write the codes, analyse the data, produce the charts, and present you with actionable insights. Founders Natalie Nguyen and Sam Zheng liken her to Siri or Cortana over the top of any company’s database that enables you to ask plain English questions about the key drivers of your business. The deployment takes 3-5 business days, compared to other alternatives which take 6 months to 1 year for a number rigid dashboards.
CancerAid
CancerAid is an app that empowers cancer patients and their caregivers. It aims to be the gold-standard tool for cancer patients worldwide. CancerAid’s founders are cancer doctors, Nikhil Pooviah and Raghav Murali-Ganesh, who are passionate about their cause of making the lives of those living with cancer easier. The team have already raised a substantial amount in seed investment and generated significant revenue from customers before the product has reached initial development stage. Officially launching in August 2016, CancerAid is the first of its kind tool that helps anyone diagnosed with cancer to navigate through each stage of their cancer journey, receive care remotely and reduce the isolation of illness.
Seatfrog
Seatfrog is the next generation of merchandising technology for airlines. A mobile first, customer centric auction platform for upgrades on the day of departure, selling seats guaranteed to otherwise fly empty. Airlines can now use Seatfrog’s mobile platform to increase ancillary revenue by targeting passengers within 48hrs of their flight, during the peak period of engagement for ancillaries. Seatfrog was started by founders Iain Griffin, Ben Ient and Dirk Stewart to offer an intuitive mobile experience giving travellers access to business class seats which would have otherwise flown empty. Since their launch in 2016, the team have set up a global partnership with Amadeus, taken $1.2 million in investment from travel industry heavyweights including Howzat Partners, set up an office in London, grown their team to 20 and have contracts in place with big global travel brands who are set to launch on the platform in the second half of 2017.
Spriggy
Spriggy is an independent technology and education brand, helping families teach children about money in today’s digital age. Their prepaid card and app are available for children as young as eight years old to use with their parents. Founders Mario Hasanakos and Alexander Badran created Spriggy out of a desire to provide a simpler way for parents to give their kids pocket money, while teaching them valuable habits for managing money in an increasingly cashless society. Since launching in late 2016, Spriggy has signed up over 25,000 users, with over 200 parents and kids joining Spriggy each day. The independent company was featured on H2 Ventures / KPMG Fintech 100 Emerging Star list in 2016. Mario and Alex are constantly looking at ways to evolve their product based on customer feedback, and will be focused on building out Spriggy’s functionality in the future.
Wattblock
Wattblock offers quick, customised energy saving roadmaps online for strata buildings which can reduce their energy consumption by up to 65%. Using data analytics to estimate energy waste in buildings, Wattblock eliminates the need for expensive on site energy auditors to get started on energy efficiency initiatives. The business was co-founded by Brent Clark and Ross McIntyre in 2014 to assist buildings with energy tariff optimisation, planning energy efficiency projects, product and service selection, financing and planning ahead for solar, batteries, electric vehicle recharge and embedded electrical networks. They won a place in Telstra’s muru-D technology accelerator program in 2014, then in 2015 completed a capital raise of $1 million and opened an office in Brisbane office to expand their Australian footprint. They have won a City of Sydney Environmental Innovation Grant and in 2016 they won SCA Innovation of the Year. Moving forward they are working with the City of Sydney to look at the problem of electric vehicles in strata buildings; a project which has now extended into Queensland with support of Griffith Uni and Energex.
Blueshyft
Blueshyft is an iOS-based platform installed in over 1,200 retailers across Australia. The platform allows businesses to accept cash payments for their digital goods and services. Customers can use cash to load their digital wallet, credit their online account, pay for online orders, and purchase gift cards. The blueshyft platform also facilitates acquisition, identification, retail, logistics, subscription and activation services. Founder Kain Warwick wants to revolutionise the utilisation of the largest retail network in Australia and connect the local convenience of bricks and mortar locations with ecommerce products and services. To date, the team has raised $3.77 million from investors and mid-2016 they started a joint venture with Bitcoin exchange Bitcoin.com.au launching an over-the-counter platform for selling Bitcoin. Meaning, for the first time, Australians can buy Bitcoin over the counter with cash.
RainCheck
RainCheck is a Mobile Commerce Platform for retailers and brands that opens up Mobile as a Channel direct to consumers. The platform allows people to save items they discover online and notify them at a contextual and relevant time when out shopping near stores that stock those items. Founded by Cameron Wall, William Lin and Lucas Bigwood, the platform leverages Location services, Machine Learning and AI to tailor a personalised experience for the user, allowing them to discover and share favorited items. When a purchase is made, either online, in-app or even in-store, RainCheck users are rewarded with CashBack. The startup has seen almost $1.5M in RainChecked items after just a few months during a pilot with a handful of retailers in Australia so far.
Source: The Martec