Early stage investment company Antler Australia recently backed a new cohort of startups as part of its ongoing program to build great local tech companies.
Startup Daily is sharing the details of each venture in the “Antler Investor Memos” series, which is designed to give you a quick, sharp understanding of the startups and people involved, with many seeking follow up capital following Antler’s initial pre-seed investment.
Company: Braiv
Founded: December 2023
Stage: Pre-seed
Founders: Ben Radcliffe (CEO) and James Xabregas (CTO)
Current investors: Antler
Currently raising: Yes
The Business
Spurred on by the pandemic in 2020, e-learning has become one of the fastest-growing industries in the world, with an annual growth rate of 20.5% projected through 2030. By the end of the decade, the e-learning market is expected to surpass $1 trillion globally.
For online educators, recent advancements in AI unlock new opportunities to expand into foreign markets by translating and dubbing their video content into other languages.
But despite these advancements, solutions are fragmented and locked behind multiple costly platforms. This leaves users managing multiple caption and video files that then need to be manually uploaded to their learning management platforms, only for them to resort to creating duplicate courses to support each language. These issues make current platforms and processes too costly and complex to scale educational content to global audiences effectively.
Braiv aims to remove these barriers by providing a holistic solution for educators and course creators to localise their video content easily, affordably, and in time, automatically.
The Braiv platform integrates AI-powered translation, dubbing, and captioning directly into a customisable multi-language video player, simplifying the process of delivering multilingual video content.
For sectors like online education, Braiv presents an attractive solution as these educators strive to expand their courses to foreign markets, across multiple languages.
As well as automating the provisioning of multi-language video assets, Braiv streamlines the delivery of multilingual video through their signature product, Braiv Player, which provides intuitive, single-click or automated language switching for viewers.
Braiv was created after CEO Ben Radcliffe spent 15 years in education technology and sales working with Apple. He witnessed first-hand the challenges organisations face when making content more accessible to diverse audiences, but how platforms like YouTube lack the proper branding, security, and privacy features required for organisations.
CTO James Xabregas’s background in engineering and solution architecture from his work at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) makes him the ideal technical co-founder.
Antler investment thesis
“Braiv is an advanced online video hosting, editing and streaming platform that allows marketers to customise, caption, translate, and dub their videos using AI,” says James McClure, Partner at Antler in Australia.
“The team is made up of complementary co-founders, Ben and James, who have shown great resilience and hustle in testing and validating this business model, and building the business.
“We know this is a rapidly evolving, highly VC- backable space with Veed.io raising $35M from Sequoia, and we have conviction that Braiv can attract similar success.”
Traction/milestones
After just seven months of development, Braiv successfully launched its MVP, including core features such as video hosting, captioning, and dubbing.
Additionally, Braiv has built automations into the platform that allow for zero-click language switching, which automatically adjusts based on the viewer’s native language settings.
Braiv has already built a simple way to integrate its player into one of the largest learning management platforms and aims to expand these key integrations across various course creator and corporate training platforms.
Braiv has garnered early interest from over 1,000 users on its waitlist. This level of demand, alongside corporate interest from major enterprises, including a NYSE-listed SaaS provider, underscores its potential to scale in the highly competitive B2B market.
Most recently, Braiv was awarded a $75,000 QLD Ignite Spark grant, an initiative by Advance Queensland that supports Queensland-based small to medium businesses developing innovative products or services. The grant will help Braiv to refine its platform and prepare for market entry, with a particular focus on strengthening its AI capabilities and expanding its user base.
Latest funding
Pre-Seed from Antler
Use of Funds
The funds will enhance Braiv’s product features like UI/UX design, refine AI models for accurate translation and dubbing, and scale infrastructure to support high-volume video hosting and processing.
These improvements are key to positioning Braiv as a user-friendly solution for course creators and businesses looking to localise video content efficiently, especially in a market where managing multiple tools for captions, translations, and hosting is a common pain point.
Funds will also support the building of key integrations with major learning management systems and even social platforms to support creators in marketing their online courses via short or long-form videos across all their social media platforms.
The founders say
“Building a business is not easy, and nothing is “obvious” for first-time founders. Antler has always been there with solid advice, strategic direction, and ability to make introductions to help support the building and growth of our company,” says Braiv CEO Ben Radcliffe
“We are driven by passion, and a desire to support the future education, for future generations. Our vision is that providing multi-language video, especially in education, becomes a defacto expectation globally.
“We believe language no longer has to be a barrier, especially when it comes to access to knowledge, and we see Braiv as being a driving force in this global shift in accessibility standards.”
What’s next?
Antler, a global early-stage VC, is revealing its latest investments in ambitious Australian founders and startups. With over 120 investments in early-stage companies, Braiv is one of its most recent portfolio companies.
- StartupDaily is the official media partner of Antler in Australia.
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