Antler Investor Memo Series: Unseen makes data intelligence easy to access and use, starting with real estate

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: Unseen

Founded: February 2023

Stage of business: Seed

Founders: Joanna Marsh (CEO) and William Cosby (CTO)

Investors: Antler

Currently raising: Yes

The business

The real estate sector is undergoing a transformative shift, heavily reliant on data for decision-making. This is particularly evident in areas like capital and reporting requirements such as ESG, and competitive market strategies.

Despite the real estate data, research, and analytics market burgeoning to a $150 billion industry, its accessibility is severely limited, often exclusive to the top 1% of players. The challenges are many-fold: prohibitive costs, fragmented data sets, specialised skill requirements, and poor internal adoption rates. Frequently, those who need this data most lack control over its access and utilisation.

That’s why Unseen wants to make fast, enterprise-grade market intelligence as easy as asking a question. The Unseen platform combines a custom template language, proprietary data processing engine, and language-driven AI, facilitating data providers in reaching a broader market and enabling non-technical users to derive value more efficiently and affordably.

Co-founder and CEO Joanna Marsh brings two decades of real estate sector experience, encompassing roles as a funded founder and a veteran in data, corporate investment, and innovation.

Her co-founder, William Cosby, has a wide ranging experience across multiple sectors and brings invaluable expertise as the CTO and experienced data scientist. Their partnership has catalysed the development of an AI-driven platform, simplifying the extraction and utilisation of real-estate data for a wider audience.

Antler Investment Thesis

Antler’s investment in Unseen is not just a backing of their platform; it’s an investment in a vision that aligns with emerging technology trends and with Antler’s ethos of fostering innovation, scalability, and impactful leadership over the long term. They see Unseen as a promising startup and a catalyst for democratising the commercial real estate sector and other data-driven industries.

“In the vast and evolving landscape of commercial real estate, a sector valued at over $200 trillion, the integration of data intelligence is not just a luxury—it’s a necessity,” says James McClure, Partner at Antler in Australia.

“Unseen emerges as a disruptive force in the commercial real estate arena, a domain traditionally characterised by opacity and a reluctance to embrace data-driven decision-making.

“William and Joanna embody a long-term vision that is not only ambitious but grounded in a realistic understanding of the market, and this resonates deeply with Antler’s investment philosophy. They are innovating a market that is vast in both size and diversity, offering expansive growth opportunities for their startup. Our decision to invest in Unseen is therefore rooted in a multifaceted thesis, centred on innovation, market potential, and the calibre of its founding team.”

Traction/milestones

Pre-launch, the AI analytics engine was originally built as a custom enterprise function for Investa, providing investment and market intelligence for decision making, including in one instance to acquire US$15b of commercial real estate assets across the US and Canada. After spinning out Unseen as an independent venture, Joanna and William built a senior team of eight industry and tech veterans who’ve worked in Australia, Europe and North America.

While Unseen plans to be industry agnostic, they are starting in the commercial real estate vertical – an industry the founders know well. They have been building the platform and templates with a select group of beta early adopter partners and customers in this space and have already experienced strong demand and traction.

In November 2023, Unseen publicly launched its partnership with Arealytics, combining its world-class property data with the Unseen AI platform.

With the significant fundraising round, Arealytics is expanding to 38 markets over the next five years, with Unseen being the analytics engine and enterprise AI behind it all that enhances a customer’s ability to generate fast, meaningful insights for better strategic decision-making.

Currently Unseen is raising its seed round, which will help it expand into the broader Australian market this year.

Latest funding

Pre-Seed from Antler

Use of funds

Antler’s investment and Unseen’s future seed round will help to build out more user experience capabilities on the Unseen platform and support the commercialisation of the business model. In addition to hiring additional skills the startup needs to do this, they will be investing in brand recognition for their target market and gathering the partners and advocates who will help with their go-to-market strategy.

The founders say:

“Antler’s investment enabled us to invest heavily in back-end product development during 2023,” says Will.

“Trust is a big part of our core values and vision, so this investment allowed us to strengthen our cybersecurity credentials which we know are so important to our end users.

“Over the past year, being an Antler portfolio company has also provided significant non-financial benefits, including resources, an extensive network of investors, and advisory. Antler introduced us to one of our key people, Paul A, who then worked with us to develop our customer, brand & growth strategy as well as developing the Unseen name and overseeing our new visual identity.

What’s next?

Antler, a global early-stage VC, is revealing its latest investments in ambitious Australian founders and startups. With over 100 investments in early-stage companies, Unseen is one of its most recent portfolio companies.