Tiiik raises $5.2m from the whose who of investors

#fintechfun Funding Alert 🚨 👇

Sydney based Tiiik has raised $5.2m to accelerate 🏃🏻 product development, go-to-market & launch 🚀in key global markets ✅

Tiiik is the brainchild of experienced fintech leaders Erez Rachamim, Bernardo Bilotta and Daniel Li who founded tiiik following their time at Zip Co, Equitise, and Readiitel. They have brought on board Tim Smith, who headed up Private Banking at Westpac for many years A guru on the blockchain and the muse of Fintech! 

What is Tiiik

It’s a Web3 - DEFI product - a digital wallet designed for the modern day. powered by stablecoin enabling customers to spend and earn on the same balance.

It’s  a world class solution to help the everyday person make money in a really simple way using blockchain and other smart financial technologies.

Tiiik is an intuitive web and mobile app integrating  PayID and  blockchain technologies enabling customers to transfer funds directly from and into their  bank account, creating  a seamless onboarding process.

They have developed  interest calculation algorithms that power the on/off ramping of fiat into stablecoins. The more efficient these run in the back-end the better, as they create an improved user experience.

Investors 

Tiiik has 16 full-time staff with a whose who investor list including

Global Founders and Fintech collective ,  DACM, B Digital, Decision Tree Capital, Investible, LedgerPrime, 0x Ventures, Athena Ventures, Double Peak, Valhalla Capital, Parsiq, Gate.io, NxGen and Waterdrip Capital.

Other key investors behind the raise include Alvin Singh and Bosco Tan (co-founders at Pocketbook), Larry Diamond (co-founder at Zip Co), Heslin Kim (co-founder at SupraOracles), Jonty Kelt (founder at Fantail Ventures) and Lucas He (co-founder at OP Crypto).

Global Founders Capital partner Tito Costa and FinTech Collective partner Sean Lippel said the market for serving DeFi enabled yield products to wholesale and retail investors is still nascent across the globe - and Tiiik seems to be on the money 

Flo - the Canva for Engineers

Launching in July 31 from a $5.1m seed round supported by a range of investors including Blackbird, Kim Jackson’s Skip Capital, Jelix Ventures, Culture Amp co-founder Doug English and engineering leaders Zak Islam (Atlassian’s VP of engineering at Atlassian) and Seb Ruiz (director of engineering at Canva).

and being named  Startup of the Year at the Sydney Young Entrepreneur Event - founders Dale Brett and Rani Adams are ready to fly 

The pain 

Lack of Talent - shortage for engineers. 

How to ship quality software in short amounts of time. 

Instead of spending time on managing backend infrastructure, teams should focus on solving problems for customers. 

We need to continue solving this problem further up the stack, with aims to do the same for code. 

We had the idea to create prewritten building blocks of code, that you can link together to build all types of complex logic.

Our goal is to help engineers build at 20x the speed, and democratise technology for the next generation of creators.

The Value proposition - What Flo Does 

Flo takes the complexity out of building backend systems by offering a simple platform for engineers. 

Flo provides an abstracted layer above the code, which is like a ‘Lego kit’ of blocks that allows the building of complex applications without the need to write code. 

In software engineering and building products, there are so many elements that need to be set up in order to create the foundation for a product. A lot of this is boilerplate where you are reusing the same code over and over again. FL0 makes this easy for engineers by spinning it all up automatically behind the scenes, so engineers can skip straight to building and have a solution live in minutes. 

Another challenge is that every engineer has their own way of doing things, resulting in a lack of standardisation for how products are developed. FL0 helps to standardise this process with pre-built coding blocks, a marketplace app store and custom built blocks. This helps to provide a larger talent pool for companies, enabling them to bring on engineers from different coding backgrounds. 

As technology has evolved, users have started to expect everything to work together. This means the software you are building needs to connect to other systems. Engineers spend a lot of time trying to understand new systems, figuring out how they can work together and then building a solution. FL0 removes this challenge entirely with a marketplace of prebuilt apps, and technology to rapidly integrate to any third party system so engineers can connect everything in just a few clicks.

If you’re thinking about building something, you want to build it on FL0. 

The importance of Having strategic investors 

Having investors from some of the top global VCs, founders, CEOs and engineering leaders from some of the world’s best tech companies has been extremely helpful in all areas. 

They’ve helped with strategic introductions, intros to key hires, access to new developer networks and providing feedback and input to our roadmap and product. It’s exciting to have such talented people believe in our vision and product. 

Learnings from the past 

Teamwork -  it’s about empowering your team and backing them in their decisions. Even if we may not agree on something, once a decision is made we all commit to backing that decision. 

Focus - When there’s a lot of excitement in what you’re doing and a lot of customers asking you for things, It's easy to get caught up in saying ‘yes’. The problem with that is that you spread yourself too thin very quickly. Saying no is very important.

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Creating a thriving  developer community - 

FL0 is emerging as a central platform of building blocks, which has everything you need to rapidly scale a new product, or enhance an existing product with new features and functionality.

We’re seeing a huge spike in NFT products being built, and FL0 offers huge amounts of flexibility and speed to empower creators to build these next generation products. 

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Dale's Inspiration 

A book/video that is worth reading/watching: The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen from A16Z. It’s all about launching a company in the early days, with interesting interviews from some of the most iconic and successful global tech founders. 

A podcast you never miss: The Flow State podcast with binaural sounds and beats to help focus during work. This is the main soundtrack in our Sydney HQ office (I love it!). If I'm looking to learn from great founders on specific business topics, I listen to A16Z, In Depth, or Wild Hearts!

The last great article you read: An old one but a great one to refer back to; Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra talks about an interesting way of finding product market fit.

Someone to follow on socials: I’m a big gaming fan, so I follow Jon Lai from A16Z to always get the latest on gaming technology, NFTs and the metaverse.

https://blackbird.vc/blog/spotlight-on-dale-brett-fl0

Building our Future - nurturing the Innovators

At last - the big end of town sees the value of backing the commercialisation of Australia’s R and D and Innovation

Onwards and a upwards 

This is big news !!!

The $106 billion UniSuper fund has made  a $75 million investment in Uniseed, Australia’s longest running early-stage commercialisation fund.

The move will give UniSuper exposure to a suite of Uniseed startup ventures, many of which have gone on to successful IPOs and buyouts.

Established in 2020, Uniseed is owned by the University of Melbourne, University of Queensland, University of Sydney, University of New South Wales and the CSIRO.

 The group provides seed funding for research and technology developed by the partners, all of which are major research organisations in their own right, creating about half of all patents in Australia.

“UniSuper has always championed Australia’s thinkers, creators and investigators (and) Uniseed is at the forefront of new start-ups and technologies,” says UniSuper’s chief investment officer John Pearce.

“This is an excellent opportunity for UniSuper to actively participate in the development and commercialisation of research and technology that will shape the future. We look forward to seeing this investment blossom and grow over time.”

Uniseed is chaired by David Miles, a former chairman of Innovation Australia, and it counts former South Australian chief scientist Leanna Reid as a director.

This is a slideshow I posted 20 years ago!!

https://www.slideshare.net/ikayebsi/our-call-for-investment-in-startups-in-2002-13-years-on-the-time-has-come

Linktree becomes a unicorn from a side hustle started in Oz 5 years ago

Linktree - the 5 year old social media platform founded by brothers Alex and Anthony Zaccaria and Nick Humphreys, has raised US$110m and become a unicorn at a $US1.3 billion valuation .

The funding round was led by Index Ventures and Coatue Management, supported by  AirTree Ventures, Insight Partners and US-based global investment firm Greenoaks.

Greenoaks  have also backed Deliveroo, Stripe, Airwallex and Discord.

What Linktree does 

The problem that Linktree solves is for brands to monetise their presence on social media.

Linktree allows influencers,  celebrities, sports stars and brands to create a single page to consolidate their presence across various online services, with the ability to accept payments.

Brands on the platform include TikTok, Red Bull and HBO and celebrities such Selena Gomez and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson , and has emerged as a brand that creators and their audiences trust.”

What they will be doing with the money raised 

Linktree  are looking to hire another 200 to 300 people over the next year across the US and Australia - to consolidate and grow its market share. 

It faces many up and coming competitors seeking to claim the “link in bio” market, or promote other waysfor influencers and brands to convert popular online profiles into commercial transactions.

“Linktree has brand scale with over 24 million users and over 1.2 billion visits a month with msignificant users on the platform, as well as great partnerships with the platforms.” Says Alex Zaccaria 

AirTree Ventures partner Jackie Vullinghs believes Linktree is well established and far enough ahead of the curve to beat any “copycats”, and that there was significant opportunity for further commercialisation of the platform.

Other siblings creating amazing businesses  

Sam and Ryan Kroonenburg took six years to build A Cloud Guru before it was acquired for $2 billion last year; 

James and Robbie Ferguson are co-founders at $3.5 billion-valued crypto platform Immutable 

Gabby and Hezi Leibovich are leading figures in the local e-commerce market after founding and selling Catch Group to Wesfarmers.

And let’s not forget 

Simon and Nicky Zimmerman - creating the iconic Zimmerman brand 

Alex Zaccaria chats  to Paul Smith of the AFR about the deal and the advantages of having a sibling partner 

“If we don’t agree we tell each other how it is, and it is like that ultimate psychological safety that you strive for in a workplace.

“If we disagree we can be best friends again a minute later, because we have spent our whole lives doing that.”

Who says you can’t raise money after 20 years in business ?

Protecht co-founders former PWC colleagues, David Bergmark and David Tattam have raised $42m after starting their risk management software company 22 years ago - in 1999 - having built it to a $20m pa company - with revenue primarily in Australia and NZ.

They knew they could scale globally after testing the UK and USA market - and  David has moved to Santa Monica to Scaleup Protecht!!

They knew they needed capital to do it!

They hired a US-based advisor, who contacted over 250 growth equity funds, before narrowing down a list and got Santa Monica-based global growth equity firm Arrowroot Capital came on as its lead investor.

And have raised $A42 million 

Clients 

The company primarily services  mid sized companies in financial services, government and university sectors. It has over 300 clients including Tyro, Toyota Australia, the Sydney Opera House, the National Rugby League and Melbourne Polytechnic.

What Protecht does 

Protecht’s software supports companies manage its enterprise risk across the business -  identifying key risks, adding mitigating controls, and continually monitoring risks through key-risk indicators and capturing incidents.

Traditionally, risk management has been performed in silos across organisations, with each department focused on its own segregated risk, usually in the form of an excel spreadsheet.

“It’s inefficient, it's ineffective, the board don't get what they want in a consolidated view as they get different reports,” Tattam says.

“Protecht.ERM (enterprise risk and compliance management) is about consolidating that all together so the board gets what they want at a higher level.

“The client receives a dashboard covering all the risks of the enterprise that's able to be drilled down so that the coalface get what they want and, the principle we try and aspire to is: one source of truth, multiple uses of the data.”

Although financial services, especially in the US, remains the target sector for Protecht, risk management is now standard practise across many sectors.

Protecht’s approach, regardless of risk type or risk category, allows for integrated, consistent reporting across all departments on a simple web-based platform with workflow rules and analytics, irrespective of industry.  

“Our mission has always been and remains to change the way the world thinks about risk and deploy innovative risk management technology to support excellence in risk management,’ Tattam says.

About Arrowroot Capital 

Arrowroot is a Growth fund investing in scaleups
Protecht is the third Aussie investment for Arrowroot, which has previously backed HammerTech, Snaplogic and Fluent Commerce , and they are keen to invest more in Aussie companies .

Why?

“Australia has a strong core ecosystem with early stage investors helping companies get off the ground and a great university ecosystem creating computer scientists and engineers to launch these companies.”

Earlywork winning the hearts of Gen Zs and the tech industry

Dan Brockell , Marina Wu and Jono Herman  - founders of Earlywork, has closed $700K in pre-seed funding led by James Tynan at Square Peg, supported by Archangel Ventures, Phase One Ventures & several angels to go full-time! 

Earlywork helps Gen Zs get into tech jobs…. And charge a fraction of the price of a normal recruiter . They engage people living in shared houses to work on specific projects - through EarlyHome! 

They are a community-first project, and in everything we hope to create over the years to come, it all comes back to the question of how we can best help each of you in your journey to work on, and create something you care about deeply.

They have grown their slack community to over 2000 and have a subscriber base of over 4000!!!

The Pain EarlyWork is trying to solve 

Where can the Gen Zs work and feel engaged and inspired? 

Certainly not feeling insignificant in corporate bureaucracy - dreading going to work - feeling burnt out !!!

Crises in climate, inequality and social inclusion are highlighting major flaws in how our society operates today.

How can a GenX make a meaningful career and make a positive dent on the planet using technologies like AI, Web3, and AR/VR - which are  literally creating new worlds of opportunity.

Mentors 

Keen Beans 🌱(community advisors) & Sages 🧙 (company advisors), who’ve been there from the early days as champions of the community we’ve worked to cultivate: Dan Sutherland, Penny Talalak, Bryce Chee, Arni Mittal, Abhi Maran, Elaha Gurgani, Sean Stuart, Eezu Tan, Lucas Leung, Rohyl Joshi, Ahnaf Aaqif, Saurav Risbud, Justin Teo, Lucy Tan, and Steve Solomon.

Welcome to the #NexttechRevolution #bbgforum 

Check out the SMH feature!

Cake raises $3m to help startups around the world scale

Cake Equity (Cake)  is looking to launch into 20 countries with A$3m raised from Jason Calacanis’s LAUNCH, TheSyndicate.com and Paul Naphtali’s Rampersand

What Is Cake Equity 

“At Cake, we want to be the catalyst for more startups to get funded so that they can change the world while making sure that their teams share in that success,” Cake Equity co-founder Jason Atkins said.

Cake’s SAAS equity management platform aims to speed up the complicated process of managing and unlocking equity whilst remaining legally compliant. 

It helps startups and scaleups manage employee options, raise capital and manage shareholders.

The software  provides services from signing to calculations and comes with built-in legal agreements to keep track of equity transactions.

It allows companies to better incentivise staff by cutting out some of the administration around offering employee share options.

Customers 

Co-founded by Atkins and Kim Hansen, Cake has more than 2,000 companies and 50,000 shareholders using its platform, including Who Gives a Crap, Vow and Fresh Equities. 

Investees 

The latest raise included participation from Airtasker (ASX: ART) co-founder Jonathan Lui and Practice Ignition co-founder Guy Pearson.

“We’re inspired by Cake’s aspiration to empower more founders and their teams to change the world u- because at Rampersand we share the same vision,” co-founder and managing partner at Rampersand, Paul Naphtali enthuses to Neil Dorgan of Business News Australia .

“Cake is further proof that Australian start-ups can create the best global technology solution to fundamental problems, and we look forward to accelerating Cake’s impact within the start-up ecosystem.” 

Charity 

In May 2021, Cake joined Pledge 1%; a movement co-founded by Australian software giant Atlassian that sees companies donate 1 per cent of shares to philanthropic organisations.

Neil Dorgan of Business News Australia .

Predictive Hire - getting rid of Bias in Recruiting

A recruitment bot beats recruitment bias 

CEO Barb Hyman and PredictiveHire and Siri’s equiavalent - Phai - has won  customers including Afterpay, Woolworths Qantas , Spark NZ, EnergyAustralia, Medibank Private, Suncorp, Freedom, Jemena, Iceland Foods, Holland & Barrett, Virgin Mobile , WOLT. And a host of other clients in 47 countries. 

Phai interviews a job candidate every 30 seconds and has raised $7m from Aconex’s Leigh Jasper and a cohort of other investors.

What does Phai and predictive Hire do?

Phai discovers a person’s personality traits from their written answers to five questions…. And removes bias from the interview process.

PredictiveHire  shortlists candidates  who best match the role, before a human steps in and conducts the next stage of the hiring process.

The insights from the interview are gleaned without consideration of a person’s history, gender or any identifying information.

PredictiveHire adapted Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) – a natural language pre-training algorithm that is used for training AI algorithms before large inputs of data.

When being interviewed by the bot, people are given 48 hours to complete the five-set questions, which are designed to test applicants’ suitability for a role and also yield insights into their personalities.

Questions for a Woolworths role ranged from how an applicant had previously responded to missing a work deadline or personal commitment, to telling the bot about a time they’d made someone’s day better.

And while companies are given insights on potential employees, so too are job applicants.

Once someone has submitted their answers, PredictiveHire automatically emails the applicant  insights into their personality, and coaching tips on how to improve.

Barb wants to eventually turn Predictive hire  into a tool that gives everyone access to an AI coach in their pockets.

About 1.3 million candidates have been interviewed by Phai, enabling PredictiveHire to accumulate a proprietary data set of 550 million words – which it says is the largest of its kind in the world.

Barb Hyman shares a few insights 

“There’s a lot of mirror hiring, and it’s why there’s so many white men in start-ups. Bias in Recruiting is not ok ‘“

“The CV is also a very poor proxy for anything. The sooner we get rid of the CV, the sooner businesses will see real talent.”

“What you can glean from a short conversation with a chatbot is more than you could in an initial interview, or certainly more than a CV.”

“What you get from using clean data sets and a process that’s truly blind is you fix the inequity in the world. You fundamentally don’t need targets or quotas any more,” Ms Hyman said.

“One client, Woodie’s in Ireland, in six months they hired three times more ethnic minorities than any of their diversity initiatives had achieved in the previous two years.”

Inspired by Yolanda Redrup - AFR 

https://www.afr.com/technology/this-bot-will-judge-you-in-five-questions-at-the-first-interview-20220302-p5a15v

VC is running hot with Zeller reaching Unicorn status

Paul Bassat of Square Peg is excited to be investing again with @Hostplus in the ex Square execs Ben Pfisteter and Dominic Yap and their  team - as  their fintech Zeller raised a further $100m and reached unicorn status at a $1b valuation within 2 years. 

(Beating Airwallex who became a unicorn in 3 and a half years )

What is Zeller 

Zeller’s aim is to be a one-stop shop for businesses’ banking needs.

It initially offered debit cards, business banking accounts and payment terminals, but it plans to also offer online payment acceptance, credit cards and expense management services.

In time, it wants to expand into lending and become a fully licensed bank under the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.

The company has more than 11,000 business customers -  81 per cent have switching  to Zeller from another bank.

Investors in Zeller 

Zeller has raised over $181M from investors  including Square Peg ,  Apex Capital Partners, Spark Capital, Addition (founded by Lee Fixel), Headline and Hostplus - starting with a $6.3m seed round in June 2020

VC is booming with Valuations at record highs 

Yolanda Redrup from AFR points out that that the Vc market is booming in Oz - with competition for dealflow pushing up valuations .

Zeller joins Cyara, Scalapay and Employment Hero in having raised more than $100 million this year, while Dovetail, HappyCo, Karbon, Milkrun and Eucalyptus have each raised upwards of $50 million. 

In 2021 $10 billion of capital flowed to Aussie start-ups

Trace tracks carbon emissions from SMEs and raises $1.5m

Catherine (Cat) Long and Joanna Auburn have founded Trace “with the goal of  helping customers and teams  navigate the journey to Net Zero,”

As part of the Antler accelerator programme, with pre-seed funds of $400k they founded Trace - and developed a  low-cost system to help SME’s track and manage their carbon emissions and make their business “climate  positive “

On the back of acquiring 100 clients in the past 12 months, they have recently  raised another round of $1.5 million from 21 investors including 

• private family office 5 Pillars Capital,
• Antler, The Fund, 
• Epoch Capital, 
• Existential Capital and 
• several angel investors, including Envato co-founder Collis Ta’eed .

What is Trace 

It is a streamlined data collection portal and powerful emissions calculation engine, that helps customers and teams  navigate the journey to Net Zero, by calculating a company’s carbon footprint in a matter of days, at an accessible price point for any size business, wherever they are on their sustainability journey.

“We’re encouraged to see that demand from SMEs willing to invest in taking climate action is accelerating.” With 100 clients being acquired in the last 12 months with a view to get to 1000 - fast!!!