Gembot.ai is a smart investment platform. Charlie started it because he was frustrated that he couldn’t find this for himself: he wanted to know statistically and visually what his exposure looked like at any time. Gembot provides transparent, low cost and informed investment. How do you set this up from scratch? Listen to Charlie’s journey! He’s on a mission to help people grow wealth.
Claudia Smith & Russell Smith built AML platform APLYiD to allow companies to verify customers online in seconds using biometric measures. APLYiD now has over 1,000 customers in Australia, New Zealand & the UK. Claudia and Russell each had a background in identity work and knew the corporate environment well. In this podcast they talk about how they work together, how they complement each other and what they’ve learned about building a tech company fast.
Bspkl makes high-performance catalyst coated membranes for hydrogen production - using 25x less catalyst metal than alternatives. Christina joined the inventor of this technology, Jérôme Leveneur, to build a company based on his technology. Christina talks about why hydrogen production as the first market, the challenges of raising funds, and their ambition to make a genuine difference in the world, opening pathways for the scientists, startups & employees.
ADInstruments makes scientific hardware & software for biomedical research and education with offices in 15 countries & 220 people around the world. Its customers include the top 100 universities & the top 10 pharmaceutical companies. The company has been built over 37 years. Alex has been CEO for the last 4 years and has overseen the growth of the SaaS business, which is now a significant part of their revenue.
ecoPortal started as an environmental risk management consultancy. Bringing its sustainability origins into the larger health & safety picture, it now supports enterprise retail, transport, and logistics companies worldwide to achieve their health & safety engagement goals. Manuel talks about ecoPortal’s humble beginnings as a consultancy and the journey of bootstrapping the company to 75 people. He also sheds light on the limitations and benefits of bootstrapping.
Alyona studied Natural Language Processing before most of us had heard of AI. To start her company she looked for a problem worth solving & found the need for customer feedback analysis. Thematic is an AI-powered platform that transforms feedback into actionable insights. Alyona talks about how she built an initial product, talked to the market to find a fit, persuaded her husband Nathan Holmberg to join her, and the difference that YCombinator made for them.
Mary Vance & Nick McDonald founded Cemplicity in 2013, with Blaik Wilson taking the CEO reins in 2020. Cemplicity keeps patients remotely connected to their care teams as they go through a health service, alerting care teams when action is needed. Cemplicity has worked with over 3,000 health facilities in 8 countries and over 5 million patients. Mary & Blaik talk about building their global business in the challenging field of digital healthcare.
Ambit is an AI platform for customer service at scale. Tim & his co-founders started Ambit in 2016, seeing the opportunity to leverage the power of Generative AI to provide deeply personalised, automated conversations for customers – increasing customer satisfaction while reducing the cost to serve them. He talks about how tough it is to sell to the IT teams in large enterprises and how relationships drive almost everything.
Inhibit Coatings is a science-based company producing high-performance antimicrobial coatings for use in food safety and medical applications. It works with resin manufacturers and end-users to develop bespoke antimicrobial solutions with high effectiveness and long-lifetimes using novel nanotechnology. Eldon talks about the journey from his PhD research to first commercial sales and pursuing a licensing model to grow fast.
Futureverse is a media tech unicorn at the intersection of AI, Gaming and Web3. Its platform simplifies Web3 for developers and users and it works with brands to power their experiences, such as a recently released AI powered game built with FIFA. Aaron talks about how he & his co-founders started by building a portfolio of companies for Web3 and last year rolled up and acquired 11 companies to create Futureverse, which now has 250 people across 16 countries.
Asantha founded PaySauce to bring new technology and deep domain knowledge to small businesses wasting time and energy on paying their people. Asantha talks about the journey –learning the real pain points to solve for small businesses, and commitments to excellent customer service and to providing a great place to work. Its automating top-up pay for dairy farm workers and its pre-pay day lending are revolutionary.
Sam is the co-founder & the CEO of LawVu, a software platform for in-house legal teams. Lawyers using LawVu gain visibility over all their legal work, improve productivity & show legal’s value to the wider business. Sam talks about the journey: spending 3 years building the product with trial customers before going to market, winning an RFP for a legal team of 200 – which accelerated their product development, scaling rapidly to 125 people, and learning about fundraising along the way.
John saw the need for a seamless SaaS platform for commercial training providers: automating all the processes for promoting, selling and delivering courses. John talks about starting out with sweat equity, spending a lot of time with customers to design the product, always appearing as a global operation even when they were working from his house, and how rewarding it has been to build a company of 60 people processing $500m p a which has trained over 7m people around the world.
Kea Aerospace’s mission is to improve life on Earth using insights from the stratosphere. Solar-powered, remotely piloted stratospheric aircraft will fly continuously in the stratosphere for months to collect frequent high-resolution aerial images. Mark became fascinated with space a long time ago, and was the co-Director and seed investor of Rocket Lab. In addition to building Kea Aerospace, Mark has been instrumental in establishing an aerospace tech hub in Christchurch.
Forbury provides commercial real estate investment modelling software to customers in the UK, Australia, Singapore, Japan & New Zealand. Scott joined the founder, Steve Surridge, to build the business, with Steve focussing on new products and Scott building the team. He talks about how important it is to focus on the people who will deliver your business outcomes, and how Covid was an advantage for them and has accelerated expansion into offshore markets.
John Penno and Maury Leyland started Leaft Foods to create a new food system by capturing the most abundant protein on the planet - Rubisco from green leaves. Leaft integrates with existing farming systems, extracting the Rubisco from common forage crops & producing a high-quality silage feed as a co-product. This reduces the total nitrogen loading in the farming system & lessens the carbon footprint of farming while producing products that taste good with high nutritional value.
Spice is a founder & CEO of Marsello, a smart marketing platform for smaller retailers. Marketing is really hard for these businesses. The Marsello platform has strong reporting & analytics. Retailers can run targeted marketing with data-driven automation, email, SMS, loyalty programs & social media and measure the impact of them. Thousands of small and medium-sized retailers and hospitality operators around the world are now using the Marsello platform.
www.marsello.com
Tim is the founder & CEO of Runn.io, a resourcing and capacity planning platform. Tim previously co-founded SilverStripe, whose open-source content management system is used by thousands of organisations worldwide. He started Runn because of the frustration of being able to get company-wide visibility across sales, projects and the people needed to deliver them. Runn has employees and customers around the world, including very large companies.
Socialites is a full-service social media agency that helps organisations thrive in the dynamic digital world by using social media to bring a brand’s DNA to life, creating communities of loyal customers. The Socialites Group has grown by acquisition. It runs multi-language, multi-platform campaigns across Asia, Europe, Australasia, the Middle East, the United States and Canada.
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