June 4th Weekly Start-up Retro

G'day and welcome to Overnight Successes, the weekly newsletter that makes you smarter about the Aussie start-up and Venture scene.

A week is a long time in Aussie start-up land. Canva had its value slashed by 58% by an investor. This is a weird one, it’s not as if the value of the stock has truly changed value. Venture funds have to revalue stakes in start-ups regularly. Each fund has a discrepancy on when they do, but it's up to them to decide how they see the valuation. The same way I tell my family the value of my crypto portfolio.

The Franklin Templeton Growth Opportunities Fund paid US$20.19M for a stake in Canva back in December 2021. That stake is now worth US$8.4M.

Canva, however, is not owned by just one investor. Other investors have also cut their valuation but generally not as drastically.

Regardless, VCs worldwide will cut valuations knowing that their endgame exits are not as high as they once were.

As the OS newsletter is growing in length, (more raises and interviews!!) we’ve summarised the sections below. I’m super proud to be presenting my first start-up interview with a female-founded team doing some amazing stuff. This interview is the beginning of a series of interviews with Australia’s finest investors and founders. If you know a cool start-up, get in touch.

Contents

1. Start-up retro: summarising the weekly raises with context.

2. Notice Board: Signposting key events and opportunities in the ecosystem

3. Accredited Tweeters: Snippets from Twitter

4. Interview with a start-up: ReciMe! (50% user growth in May!)

5. (KaaS) Knowledge as a Service: 2-3 articles to make you smarter. Or share with co-workers to make them think you’re smart.

Let's get stuck in! If you’re not a subscriber yet, join the fam here!

Start-up Retro

🌱Vouch

• News: The video collection platform that allows users to create videos at scale, has raised $8M in an oversubscribed round. Gee wish this newsletter was oversubscribed. Vouch collects video’s in a Q&A platform, video testimonials and internal communications. The platform has seen growth internationally with over 5000 customers. The special sauce Vouch gives its users is engaging content created by their customers. Instead of a written testimonial, where you never know if they’re real or not, a business can request a user to send in a reflection.

• Food for thought: What other industries could benefit from real video testimonials? Amazon customer reviews come to mind.

🌱Managed

• News: Managed App, a platform that automates payments for property managers, has raised $5.3M from REA and Momentum Markets. The app automates payments between landlords, tradesmen and tenants and has over 58,000 users. The user base is an interesting mix of landlords, tenants and tradespeople creating a unique network effect. Renters who live in a Managed house may want their next landlord to also use it while tradespeople can source leads. REA Group will look at this investment strategically as they can leverage their partnerships and industry footprint to increase revenue. (Start-up Daily)

🌱Eden Brew

• News: The alternative-milk start-up founded by the CSIRO’s VC firm Main Sequence and Norco has raised $5M in follow-on investment. This round comes from Main Squuences’ new VC fund, Digitalis Ventures. Eden Brew is dairy-free and comes from a CSIRO developed fermentation technology. This is a major win for the environment. Cows are notoriously gassy and consume to produce milk. An estimated 14 per cent of Australian greenhouse gas emissions are from the agricultural sector, and over three-quarters of those are from livestock farming. CEO and founder Jim Fader said the company is aiming to meet the “doubling protein demand by 2050” and be sustainable while doing it. Really awesome stuff.

🌱Inventia Life Science

• News: Inventia, A deep health tech start-up that manufactures bioprinters, secures $4.4M from Aussie Superannuation fund HESTA. This investment brings Inventia’s total funding to $50M to date. The short version of what Inventia does: Inventia’s platform creates cell models that represent human tissues. It’s then possible to accurately understand biological processes, disease and drug responses. It is similar to how a semi-conductor would render a design and test it ‘virtually’ rather than on real circuits. Cell models speed up the testing process and allow for reproducible tests. To understand the process, check out this video from their website. (Financial Standard)

• Food for thought: A super fund investing directly into a start-up is unusual but not unheard of. Usually, super-funds let VCs do their start-up investing for them. This could be an interesting trend to watch.

🌱Pearlii

• News: Pearlii, the dental health app looking to improve the oral health of Indigenous Australians, has raised $1.5M. The app uses artificial intelligence to scan the user's teeth. Common issues like decay and gum disease can be identified and free advice is given. As almost all dental problems are preventable with regular check-ups and cleaning, Pearlli helps regional areas where there are little to no dental services. In Australia, 65% of the population has not visited the dentist in the last 2 years. Founder Dr Kyle Turner is a Wiradjuri man with amazing dreams. A fleet of Pearlii Dental trucks to visit rural communities is on the cards! The business model is unique with the app monetizing via advertising, possible now with over 20,000 app downloads. Other revenue includes oral care products with 50% of profits being donated to the Peralii Foundation. (Start-up Daily)

🌱Fliteboard

• News: The electric surfboard that uses foiling to fly has raised a Series B from a bunch of heavy hitters including Victor Smorgon Partners, Josh Liberman and Adam Scott. Fliteboard expects $50M in rev for 2022 and is already in the black. Each board retails for over $12K and can accelerate to over 45km/h and 95% of them are sold overseas. Glenn Poswell, founder of Victor Smorgon Partners will join Fliteboard as a director. Will he Fliteboard down the Yarra every morning to get to work? Only time will tell.

🌱Spriggy

• News: The pocket money app Spriggy, has extended it latest funding round with an extra $10M of funding from a mix of investors like NAB Ventures and Perennial. The round also included a few high net worth investors who you can bet used their piggy bank money, compounded annually since they were 5, to make this investment. Compounding is the 8th wonder of the world, kiddies. Spriggy now has 130,000 Aussie kids putting their hard-earned into the platform with a teens product coming out soon. This model is quite different to fintech’s of late and will teach the next generation of Aussies to SNBL, Save Now, Buy Later. (AFR)

ReciMe

Introducing the team

ReciMe is majority female-led, with 3 co-founders: Christine Nguyen (CEO/Product), Ivy Nguyen (CMO) and Will Kent (COO) who all quit their jobs earlier this year to go all-in on ReciMe.

What is your start-up and what problem are you solving?

ReciMe is a social cooking platform bringing the creator economy to cooking. Our mission is to democratise the global cooking industry and become the biggest cooking community in the world.

The problem we’re solving is two-sided: On the one hand, there are millions of cooking creators in the world who have amazing recipes - but only a small handful today are able to make a living off their passion. On the other hand, the process of cooking can be a real pain; figuring out what to cook, which recipes to trust, and then having to follow a digital recipe while cooking is time-consuming and frustrating.

We created a TikTok for cooking – where cooking creators go to publish and monetise recipes and cooks go to find the recipes they know they’ll love.

Tell us about your journey from the idea till now

We’re all really passionate home cooks and the idea for ReciMe sprouted at the beginning of COVID. We launched the MVP in November 2021 and have grown to 2.3k cooks and 200 creators today (incl 50% growth in May)! ReciMe has been bootstrapped up until now.

We opened up our $500k pre-seed round in May and are very excited to welcome several experienced angel investors to our cap table. We are currently mid-raise and still have a portion of our round to fill.

How can someone get in touch?

Please reach out if you’re interested in investing or have a warm intro for our team!

• [email protected]

• [email protected]

You can also download ReciMe on the App Store here!

Notice Board

• LaunchVic, Victoria's startup agency, is looking for founders to tackle healthy eating problems. Apply here for $10K in equity-free funding.

• Featured Start-up: We're looking to feature start-ups who are mid raise to expose them to potential investors! Reach out if you're in the middle of a raise.

• Start-up Galaxy has a ripper jobs board for roles in start-ups! Check it out here.

• Skalata Ventures is investing in up to 5 companies per month on a rolling basis. And you can apply any time. Don’t wait for the next intake, hit them up now.

Accredited Tweeters

Knowledge as a Service (KaaS)

Startmate Media Fellow Charizze Austin's 10 things I learnt connecting 100 strangers through brunch (Linkedin). Organising groups of strangers to have brunch together seems like a beautifully simple task, however, Charizze dives into the challenges of community building and cat herding. There's something to learn here for community builders through to psychologists.

The All-In podcast had its summit. They've had some very interesting conversations live including Bill Gurley's summary of the venture cycles. A sawtooth looking curve of risk tolerance building slowly over years but dropping quickly as the cycle resets.

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