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 name: Tango
Formation date: 2022
Stage of business: Pre-Seed
Founders: Sav Pushparajah and Aditya Deshpande
Current investors: Antler and angel investors
Currently raising: Yes
Description of business
Former professional services agency owners Sav Pushparajah and Aditya Deshpande are all too familiar with changing scopes of work from clients, in turn altering services agreements, and ultimately, leading to delayed or worse refused payments.
By 2032, almost all professional services will be delivered online with the entire market anticipated to grow to US$10.12 trillion.
As agencies and clients rapidly undertake the digital transformation, accelerated by the pandemic, most back-end solutions to facilitate contracts, agreements, and e-signatures do not accommodate continuously evolving scopes of work, and are rarely ever updated, even as new agreements are made.
SaaS platform, Tango, combines proposals, contracts, and payments into Live Agreements with one simple user interface. As projects evolve and change these agreements are simple to update and sign, all while disputes are resolved faster as all communications reside within Tango.
Tango’s platform leverages enhancements in technology including open APIs and generative AI to enable agencies and clients to stay in sync, streamline projects and stop unpaid scope creep.
Antler investment thesis
“Sav and Aditya have combined their lived experience as agency founders and deep appreciation of related cash flow management and administration challenges with complementary skill sets in digital transformation and enterprise sales to create a purpose-built solution,” said Cath Rogers, Partner at Antler Australia.
“With promising early traction, Tango’s Live Agreements platform is carving out a new category within this rapidly evolving space.”
Traction/ milestones, to date
Since securing Antler’s Pre-Seed funding in November, Tango secured $150,000 in grant funding from the NSW Government’s MVP Ventures Program and has added more than 1,150 service providers to its waitlist.
While Tango readies for its MVP launch, it has signed up a prominent HubSpot agency that will help refine its product, alongside a closed group of nine other agencies for launch later this quarter.
Latest funding
Pre-Seed from Antler
Use of funds
With Antler Australia’s initial investment, alongside grant funding and angel investment, Tango is accelerating its product development to launch its MVP and rapidly scale distribution. All while, it continues to build out its roadmap, which includes embedding generative AI at different stages of the agreement process.
The founders say
“As freelancers and then agency owners, we bled money when the scope of work would change, but agreements would not – and then – clients would refuse to pay. We were faced with no solution to deal with the evolving nature of services projects, other than the costly exercise of expanding headcount to hire an account manager,” said Sav Pushparajah, co-founder of Tango.
“In solving this pain point, our mission is to make Tango Agreements the standard agreements platform for professional services agencies and their clients, starting with software channel partner ecosystems like Hubspot and Webflow. By helping stop unpaid scope creep we can have a significant impact on the top and bottom lines.
“We are a global day one company, helping create agreements between agencies and their clients around the world. Our first client is a prominent agency with 70% of its clients based outside the country it operates within. Being a global VC, Antler has been able to connect us with experts across the globe whether it’s legal, payments or operations to help us move fast.”
What’s next?
Antler, a global early-stage VC, is revealing all its latest investments made in ambitious Australian founders and startups. With 100 investments in early-stage companies, Tango is one of its most recent portfolio companies.
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