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Airwallex came out in huge support of the Wellington startup community yesterday, giving away $5k to the winner of #sunrise24 pitch comp 📣 Congratulations to the winner, Sasha Lockley of Money Sweetspot, a social enterprise who consolidate personal debt, getting people paying it off faster by rewarding them everytime they consume SweetSpot's financial education content. Massive shoutout to the other founders who pitched their startups: 💳 Paysquad's Cam Richardson pitched "buy now, pay together" - a way of joining forces to buy gifts and experiences as a group, fully integrating with Shopify checkout BAM! 🏡 Homely's Roy Chowdhury pitched an AI-powered mortgage assistant, enabling more experienced home buyers to run their mortgage search on their own terms, connecting them (and their data) to lenders quickly and securely. These companies are all part of Creative HQ's fintech lab starting soon - give them a follow and introduce them to folks in your network who might fund or support their journey in some way 💥

That's a wrap on #sunrise24! Massive shoutout to Katie Tholo from Blackbird who curated a thought provoking, inspiring, and compelling line up of speakers. Every speaker exceeded our expectations. Shoutout to Sebastian Cox from Paloma for the most creative session of the day - Getting the audience to crack open "startup fortune cookies", read out the lesson, and share an anecdote about each situation 🥠 #MVP #is #dead #long #live #the #mvp Our team had an incredible day, leaving the event energised and excited to delve more into the world-changing topics showcased today. If you're feeling FOMO right now, remedy that by coming along next year. Bring on #sunrise25 🌅 Hanna (Logan) Dorsch Justin R. Alla Lvovich Timothy Chen Steph O. Stephanie Munro Lana Kennett Ryan McMillan

Notes from Blackbird's #sunrise24 This afternoon we heard from Mike Langford, VC and startup lead for Google Cloud JAPAC. He shared how all the pieces of the Generative AI tech stack fit together, noting a few kickass Aussies startups & scaleups that are adopting GenAI to boost their value prop: Kapiche "Uncovered new revenue streams and features by performing large scale sentiment analytics for unstructured data." THE ICONIC "Uplift in key business metrics adding generative AI to the retail search experience." Finder "From UI prototype to production in 4 weeks using Vertex Agent builder." Culture Amp "Prioritise safety and security while using customer data with new Generative AI features." Canva "Translation capabilities added to slides using Google Cloud Translation API." Proof that transformation isn't a buzzword, we say! #entrepreneurship #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeAI #google #cloud #googlecloud

Notes from Blackbird’s #sunrise24 Stripe’s Ben Hanna showed us that although capital raising is the lowest it’s been since 2019, transactions are higher than ever on Stripe, showing that startups are responding by monetising faster. 👉Ben told us that software platforms see a 2.5x increase in payments revenue when they embed payments into their service. 👉During his chat with MacroActive founder Ken Brickley he said he wished he had got into sales sooner, understanding customers anxiety before they become a customers. 👉Ken says that “risk management is #who, not #how - i.e Hire beyond what you can afford and get them fractional (every executive at Macroactive started out as fractional).” 👉”Give sales folks enough incentive (I.e they could become millionaires) if they hit it out of the park. If they become a millionaire, they’ll make your stock worth a lot.” 👉Spend an uncomfortable, an unusual, amount of time with your customers. Go on a road trip with them. By the third day you’ll have raw insights without the usual corporate filter. #startup #SaaS

Notes from Blackbird’s #sunrise24 Hearing from Flavia Tata Nardini and Peter Beck is life changing. If you ever get the chance to hear them speak, don’t miss it. Here’s a few lessons they shared: 🛰️Founders need to support their excellent teams to make consequential, high stake decisions. It’s sometimes unfair to get people to take the decisions that could kill the company. 🛰️Highly capitalised companies aren’t always a recipe for success. Physics doesn’t care how much money you have. Out hustle your competitor if you can’t spend more than them. A huge amount of money won’t make your customers buy you. #fleet #rocketlab

There's an abundance of fundraising taking place across Aussie & Kiwi VC 🤌 #Australia:  Viewa | "Show, don't tell" AR for e-commerce product engagement | $300k pre-seed | Led by Skalata | Founded by Kyle Young and Ed Sedgley #NewZealand:  Auror | Retail crime reporting and surveillance platform | $83m Series C | Co-led by W23 Global, Axon Enterprise, and Reinventure. With participation from Movac, GD1, K1W1, New Zealand Growth Capital Partners (NZGCP) and Folklore Ventures | Co-founded by James Corbett, Tom Batterbury and Phil Thomson Timescapes | Visual time lapse data for construction site analytics | Undisclosed Series A | Led by Icehouse Ventures | Founded by Chester Boyes Scannable | Mobile app for scanning, tracking, and managing safety equipment | $5.1m Seed | Led by DCM Ventures | Founded by Rob Stirling Sources: Startup Daily | Caffeine Daily | Otago Daily Times

Another startup to watch in 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣5️⃣ ListAssist is the epitome of #bornglobal - with their NZ team focusing exclusively on the US, where the market size for real estate agents is ~66x larger than New Zealand. Their AI tools allow natural language queries of real estate listings. Only starting in 2022, they are humbly killing it over in the United States, winning the Top Real Estate AI Startup in the Inman Connect Awards in Miami. Last week, Chris Keall broke the story on their multi-year deal with Howard Hanna, the largest independent real estate broker in the US – with 15,000 agents and just over 1 million listings across 13 states. For scale, that's roughly the same number of agents as there are in New Zealand with just a single customer in the US. Founding team Chris McGoldrick, Brittany Bastings, Ben Van Norden and Michael Challis, have created an epic example of using AI to solving problems for a specific vertical. 💥 More of this, NZ 💥

Here's some epic raises across Aussie and Kiwi VC from last week, including another Kiwi unicorn 🦄 #Australia Balo (24/7 Salesforce Help Desk) | Expert-Driven Help Desk (EDHD), which connects users to top global experts on demand for hands-on technical, strategic, and training support | Pre-seed backed by Antler | Founders: Michael Joo (CEO) and Yomi Joseph (CTO)  JustFund | Easing the financial burden of separation and enabling family lawyers to do their best work | $86m equity & debt funded by Xilium Capital, Startmate, The LegalTech Fund, Dominic Pym, Matt Allen, GCI (Global Credit Investments), and Tripple | Founded by Andy O’Connor and Jack O’Donnell, and Craig Carroll #NewZealand Crimson Education | In-depth US, UK, EU and Australian university admissions support, Australia and New Zealand medical school admissions support, local curriculum tutoring, and extracurricular mentoring | $68m Series D at $1b NZD valuation | Led by Movac with participation from HEAL Partners, Five Sigma, HighSage Ventures, Icehouse Ventures, and Tiger Global Management Sources: Startup Daily | NZ Herald | The Australian Business Review

OUT TODAY - this week on The Raise, our founder Ryan, speaks with Toby Hilliam, co-founder of Appetise. After having a few "bites at the startup cherry," Toby founded Appetise with Elise Hilliam. They started out as a consumer focused menu planning service, then pivoted into a B2B insights platform, sparked by a conversation with a friend who ran a beverage brand who said to Toby, "I have no idea whether people are buying 12 of our cans and drinking them on a night out with friends or they're just buying a six pack to drink on a sunny afternoon at the beach." Turns out, food brands are still stuck in the nineties when it comes to consumer insight, paying tens of thousands for reports with outdated data. Now, their consumer platform fuels the data for their B2B insights business. Their meal planning and smart shopping service is completely free. Toby recalls with mixed feelings the moment they sent out the email to their users, moving everyone to a free plan: "There was a huge opportunity here to basically turn off our consumer revenue, which was a little bit daunting. A couple of hundred grand just turned off overnight. But we just went all in on B2B from there." #Subscribe for the full interview - You'll hear how their B2C customers responded to the service being free all of a sudden (*clue* - surprisingly not all positive), and some exclusive news about their Aussie launch kicking off in 2025!

Another week of MASSIVE capital raises across Aussie & Kiwi VC: 📣 Our favourite companies that raised this week 📣 #Australia: BuildPass | AI-powered software for construction that streamlines operations, reduces admin, and ensures every project is on track and compliant. | $7.5 million Seed round | Led by Sydney VC Carthona Capital, supported by Leigh Jasper’s Saniel Ventures, GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner’s eponymous fund, Recursive Ventures, Horizon VC and Massive Tech Ventures | Founded by Matt Perrott and Aaron Vanston Neara | AI-powered predictive modeling software platform for critical infrastructure | US$31M in Series C | Led by EQT, with participation from Partners Group and Square Peg, with additional support from existing investors Skip Capital and Prosus Ventures | Founded by Jack Curtis, Dan Danilatos and Karamvir Singh Earthodic | Recyclable bio-based waterproof coatings for paper packaging | $6m AU seed round | Led by FTW Ventures, with participation from Circulate Capital, QIC, UniQuest, Significant Early Venture Capital, Branch Venture Group, Redstick Ventures, and follow-on funds from Tenacious Ventures, Investible, and Closed Loop Partners | Founded by Fiona Donaghey and Albert Tietz, with CEO Anthony Musumeci #NewZealand: Alimetry | Non-invasive, patient-friendly approach to the world of gastric diagnostics—helping patients gain crucial insights into their care pathways | US$18M led by GD1 (Global From Day One), and supported by Icehouse Ventures, and AGA Ventures (American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) | co-founded by Prof. Greg O’Grady, CEO, and Dr. Armen Gharibans, CTO Sources: Startup Daily | TechCrunch | StrictlyVC