Eight early-stage startups secure backing from Antler as the focus shifts to AI-led solutions

Early-stage investment group Antler has announced the latest Australian residency round through which it has backed eight startups with pre-seed funding that has targeted budding ventures with a strong artificial intelligence (AI) focus.

The residency is the 12th announced by Antler, a global “day zero” investor that backs founders from the very beginning, to support AI-first startups that are solving problems across sectors such as fintech, health, cybersecurity and robotics.

The eight startups were selected from thousands of applicants and are among the second cohort to benefit from Antler’s new capital model, the Agreement of Rolling Capital (ARC), which guarantees follow-on funding when a startup raises $300,000 or more from third-party investors.

Antler says this derisks the early-stage founder journey with deeper support from day one through to seed-stage scale.

"Antler’s model is built to thrive in tough markets - and so are the founders we back,” says Antler Australia partner Mike Abbott.

“What’s different now is the speed and breadth of solutions. We’re seeing ambitious founders harness AI to build faster with leaner teams and solve harder, more entrenched problems."

Today’s announcement comes as Antler doubles down on AI, expanding its global investment thesis around founders building transformative technologies.

Global database management group Dealroom recognised Antler as one of the world’s most active investors in AI in 2024, alongside Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), General Catalyst, Sequoia and Khosla Ventures.

Globally, portfolio companies such as Lovable, Wrtn, and Tactiq have seen explosive growth, with Series A founders supported by Antler’s international capital pathways via Antler Elevate.  Now, eight new startups have joined their ranks.

Antler has not disclosed the level of investment made in each company, but the firm’s latest Australian residency - it’s 14th - is offering founders the chance to secure up to $260,000 for 12 per cent equity in exchange for benefiting from a global network, AI-focused expertise and follow-on support through ARC.

Following are the eight startups chosen by Antler for the program.

AdviseWell

Founders: Clinton Cunningham, Shihab Hasan and Matthew Kellock

Industry: FinTech

Financial advisers and wealth managers struggle to scale under high back-office costs, labour-intensive compliance, and legacy software. Most practices are small boutiques that can’t hire enough paraplanners, leaving millions of Australians without affordable, professional advice.

AdviseWell’s AI engine acts as a virtual paraplanner, ingesting client and advisor data and producing compliant advice in minutes - work that once consumed hours, sometimes days, of specialist time.

Snapping into the advice and wealth-management tech stack, AdviseWell covers CRM, modelling, and document systems. The platform then automates end-to-end workflows, flags compliance risks in real-time, and protects client data in a bank-grade cloud environment.

AdviseWell is currently co-designing pilots with select firms, modelling real client cases and generating live advice documents. A further 15-plus practices, representing more than $100,000 in potential monthly recurring revenue and more than $3 billion of assets under advice, are queued on the waitlist.

“Most Australians will face major financial crossroads - buying a home, retiring, protecting their families, yet professional advice remains out of reach for far too many,” says Clinton Cunningham, CEO of AdviseWell.

“The real crisis isn’t demand, it’s delivery. Advisers are stretched too thin to scale. What we do is supercharge advisors to serve more people with less overhead and greater impact - without burning out. We’re a force-multiplier for an industry that needs leverage, not load.”

Auric

Founders: Adam Good and Alexander Cutri  

Industry: Health and Wellness Tech

Auric delves into the powerful emotional influence of scent which despite its deep roots in ancient cultures is supported by a growing body of scientific evidence around its effects on mood, stress and cognition.

Auric is modernising this ancient modality through its proprietary AromaSphere - a smart IoT (internet of things) scent device that delivers AI-personalised scent rituals to elevate calm, focus, energy and rest.

The platform integrates biometric data from wearables with smart lighting and sound systems to create adaptive wellness environments, at home or work.

Auric has secured a major partnership with a leading Australian retailer to co-develop a signature scent experience.

A paid pilot is under way, with a proposed phased rollout across 280 retail stores following successful testing. The product has also wrapped filming on Australia’s top-rated renovation series, The Block, which will air to more than 1.2 million viewers in August, with international syndication across more than 100 countries.

In just six months, Auric has progressed from “minimum viable product” to commercial momentum, launching a 25-unit beta across homes and workspaces, initiating a high-potential commercial pilot with a forecasted contract value of $450,000 and generating $135,000 in early D2C pre-sales.

These early signals support a projected run rate of more than $1 million in annual recurring revenue as the brand prepares for its national launch.

“Scent has been stuck in the dark ages - no personalisation, no automation. But scent is powerful; it shapes how we feel. I started Auric to make mood personal, effortless, and ambient - using AI, science, and the proven power of natural aromas. Mood is everything,” says Adam Good, CEO of Auric.

Imitation Machines

Founders: Ilya Kuzovkin and Roger Chao

Industry: Robotics

Robotics is booming across industries like agriculture, warehousing and mining but developing intelligent robotic behaviours still demands specialised coding skills and significant time.

Deploying robots in real-world settings at scale remains complex and expensive. Imitation Machines is accelerating robot development through imitation learning-as-a-service, reducing the time and expertise needed to deploy intelligent robotics.

Instead of writing code, users demonstrate behaviours via an intuitive human-robot interaction interface.

These demonstrations are then translated by the platform into robot-executable autonomous behaviours using reinforcement and imitation learning frameworks.

The team has secured two paid pilots and more than $500,000 in annual letters of intent with system integrators and hardware manufacturers. After a successful physical proof-of-concept, Imitation Machines is expanding its offering to cover a broader range of robot forms and use cases.

“We started Imitation Machines because we believe robots should learn as intuitively as humans. Programming robots by hand is slow, expensive, and limits their potential,” says Roger Chao, CCO at Imitation Machines.

“By teaching robots through demonstration, we're unlocking a future where advanced robotics can adapt to real-world needs in days, making automation accessible, flexible, and universal.”

Lodgicl

Founders: Ian Tulloch and Keith Player

Industry: InsurTech

Insurance processes such as property and home claims are burdened by time-consuming workflows and legacy systems that demand on-site damage assessments, supply coordination, extensive documentation and an array of phone calls and emails.

This lack of structured data and integration leads to delays, poor customer experiences and costly inefficiencies for insurers and service providers.

Lodgicl is digitising the home insurance claims supply chain, starting with structured assessments that reduce site visit times by up to 50 per cent.

Its mobile-first platform captures structured on-site data, links damage directly to policy terms, and uses proprietary matching IP to produce faster and more accurate assessments.

A paid pilot is live with one of Australia’s largest repairers, and three of the next four top-tier players are already secured for rollout.

Ian Tulloch, CEO of Lodgicl after years on both the insurer and supplier side of claims, noticed that “the same challenges kept surfacing: legacy systems, unstructured data, and manual decisions slowing everything down”.

“We created Lodgicl to bring structure to that complexity and connect the insurance supply chain,” he says.

PaperLab

Founder: Antonios Meimaris

Industry: Research

Scientists, R&D teams and analysts spend an enormous amount of time manually reviewing academic literature and technical documents to extract insights - a process that is slow, error-prone and overwhelming given the exponential growth of publications.

PaperLab can intelligently summarise, compare and distil this dense information at scale. Researchers can extract insights from thousands of academic papers simultaneously, slashing the time it takes to synthesise complex literature.

Its AI-powered platform targets processes that consume over 69 million hours of labour annually and costs research teams an estimated US$7 billion per year.

This means more breakthrough discoveries in fields such as climate science and oncology could be just months away, rather than decades.

Since launching its beta, PaperLab has secured a joint pilot across 30 university-led projects and attracted 179 early-access users in one day alone. A pharmaceutical R&D pilot is under way, with applications expanding into clinical research.

"After years building AI tools that could process data but never truly extract the deep insights researchers need, I realised there was a massive gap between raw information and real understanding,” says Antonios Meimaries, the CEO of PaperLab.

“I founded PaperLab to empower every researcher, and every organisation, to turn thousands of papers into actionable knowledge in minutes, so we can spend less time sifting through documents and more time driving breakthroughs."

Prefactor

Founders: Matt Doughty and Simon Russell

Industry: Cybersecurity

User authentication and authorisation are still painfully complex and resource-draining for software teams. Engineering teams must weigh up building and maintaining custom solutions - often rigid, error-prone and expensive - or off-the-shelf tools that either offer simplicity at the cost of flexibility or require heavy lifting to customise.

Offering the first domain-specific language (DSL) built specifically for unified user management, Prefactor allows engineers to define authentication, authorisation and auditing logic all in one place using their simple integration.

By unifying user logic into a single, versioned source of truth, developers can ship faster, reduce risk and maintain full control over how users access and interact with their applications.

Prefactor’s solution has already attracted 11 letters of intent and three design partners spanning Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, USA and Canada.

In March 2025, the team launched its Closed Beta, which includes five core authentication methods - Google Social Auth, Microsoft Entra SSO, Magic Links, One-Time Passcodes, and traditional user/password login - along with the first iteration of its DSL data structure.

“After building auth systems six times across high-growth companies, we started Prefactor: a unified, programmable layer for authentication, authorisation, and audit that scales seamlessly with your codebase,” says Matt Doughty, CEO of Prefactor.

“We eliminate the velocity-security trade-off - giving teams enterprise-grade access control without slowing them down. In a $25 billion-plus market full of legacy bloat, we’re building the platform that gets it right.”

RoundTable

Founders: Ronan Mason and Sergey Meshkov

Industry: ConsumerTech and Creator Economy

In the $250 billion creator economy, only 4 per cent of the 50 million global creators earn more than $100,000. Despite 77 per cent of fans expressing a desire for direct interaction with creators, most platforms are built for passive, one-way engagement (such as likes, comments and follows).

As a result, creators are left without effective tools to monetise their most engaged and valuable audiences - superfans - leaving massive income potential on the table.

RoundTable empowers creators to host live, camera-on video experiences where fans and creators interact face-to-face in real-time.

Unlike traditional, passive one-way streams, RoundTable breaks down the barrier that typically separates creators from their audiences, offering fans an immersive, VIP front-row seat to engage directly with their favourite creators.

This two-way, interactive format transforms fan loyalty into high-value, monetisable interactions with creators to deepen engagement and unlock new revenue streams.

The result is a uniquely personal and engaging fan experience that goes far beyond simply watching from the sidelines.

RoundTable earns a 20 per cent commission and offers a SaaS platform for talent agencies and companies managing multiple creators. With a beta version just launched, blending live video with seamless ticketing, RoundTable empowers creators to activate superfans and capitalise on untapped demand for real connection.

After over 20 years in music and entertainment, Ronan Mason, CEO of RoundTable, has worked alongside passionate creatives and some of the biggest names in the sector.

“With RoundTable, we’re creating new ways for them to earn from their craft - connecting directly with superfans through live video experiences and unlocking a meaningful, sustainable new source of revenue,” Ronan says.

ViaPay

Founders: Joshua James and Anton Genkin

Industry: FinTech

ViaPay modernises business transactions with AI-native automation that replaces outdated manual processes and streamlines the entire order-to-cash cycle. While front-end e-commerce has evolved, back-end systems have not caught up, bogged down by manual invoicing, rigid processes and delayed payments.

 This leads to wasted time, errors and unnecessary overhead for businesses on both sides of the transaction. ViaPay addresses this by automating how businesses manage invoicing, payments and reconciliation.

Its platform combines agentic artificial intelligence with customer data to automate workflows and eliminate manual interventions. Businesses get faster payments, fewer errors and save tens of hours every week on administrative tasks.

ViaPay has secured over 10 letters of intent, including an ASX-listed company and a global online marketplace. A live pilot is under way, with further integrations planned in the coming months.

“We started ViaPay because business-to-business payments are stuck in the past,” says Joshua James, CEO of ViaPay.

“We saw that businesses are still relying on manual invoicing and outdated payment processes which creates a lot of unnecessary work for buyers and sellers. We're fixing this.

“ViaPay brings AI-native automation to streamline transactions, making it easier to do business. Our mission is simple: to make B2B payments feel as effortless as B2C.”