Antler has unveiled its latest investments from the 12th Australian residency: eight new startups selected from thousands of applicants, spanning robotics, cybersecurity, and health – all with a strong emphasis on AI.
The cohort reflects a growing trend for Antler: more founders building at the intersection of AI and deep industry expertise, moving faster than ever to validate ideas, build traction, and raise early capital.
This cohort is the second to benefit from Antler’s new capital model, the Agreement of Rolling Capital (ARC), which guarantees follow-on funding when a startup raises AU$300,000 or more from third-party investors – de-risking the early-stage founder journey with deeper support from day one through to Seed-stage scale.
“Antler’s model is built to thrive in tough markets – and so are the founders we back,” said Antler Australia Partner Mike Abbott. “What’s different now is the speed and breadth of solutions. We’re seeing ambitious founders harness AI to build faster with leaner teams and solve harder, more entrenched problems.”
The announcement comes as Antler doubles down on AI, expanding its global investment thesis around founders building transformative technologies. Dealroom recognised Antler as the world’s most active in AI in 2024. Globally, portfolio companies like Lovable, Wrtn, and Tactiq have seen explosive growth, with Series A founders supported by Antler’s international capital pathways via Antler Elevate.
Now, eight new startups have joined their ranks. Meet the founders building what’s next below.
AdviseWell
Founders: Clinton Cunningham (CEO), Shihab Hasan (CAIO), Matthew Kellock (CTO)
Industry: B2B SaaS | FinTech
Financial advisers and wealth managers struggle to scale under high back‑office costs, labour‑intensive compliance, and legacy software. Most practices are small boutiques that can’t hire enough paraplanners, leaving millions of Australians without affordable, professional advice.
AdviseWell’s AI engine acts as a virtual paraplanner, ingesting client and advisor data and producing compliant advice in minutes – work that once consumed hours, sometimes days, of specialist time.
Snapping into the advice and wealth‑management tech stack, AdviseWell covers CRM, modelling, and document systems. The platform then automates end‑to‑end workflows, flags compliance risks in real-time, and protects client data in a bank‑grade, ISO 27001‑ready cloud environment.
AdviseWell is currently co‑designing pilots with select firms, modelling real client cases and generating live advice documents. A further 15+ practices, representing more than $100 K in potential monthly recurring revenue and over $3 B of assets under advice, are queued on the waitlist.
“Most Australians will face major financial crossroads – buying a home, retiring, protecting their families, yet professional advice remains out of reach for far too many,” says Clinton Cunningham, CEO of AdviseWell. “The real crisis isn’t demand, it’s delivery. Advisers are stretched too thin to scale. What we do is supercharge advisors to serve more people with less overhead and greater impact – without burning out. We’re a force‑multiplier for an industry that needs leverage, not load.”
AdviseWell founders Shihab Hasan, Clinton Cunningham, and Matthew Kellock
Auric
Founders: Adam Good (CEO), Alexander Cutri (CTO)
Industry: Health and Wellness Tech
The powerful emotional influence of scent – despite its deep roots in ancient cultures and a growing body of scientific evidence around its effects on mood, stress, and cognition.
Auric is modernising this ancient modality through its proprietary AromaSphere – a smart IoT scent device that delivers AI-personalised scent rituals to elevate calm, focus, energy, and rest. The platform integrates biometric data from wearables with smart lighting and sound systems to create adaptive wellness environments – at home or work.
Auric has secured a major partnership with a leading Australian retailer to co-develop a signature scent experience. A paid pilot is underway, with a proposed phased rollout across 280 retail stores following successful testing. The product has also wrapped filming on Australia’s top-rated renovation series, The Block, which will air to over 1.2 million viewers in August – with international syndication across 100+ countries.
In just six months, Auric has progressed from MVP to commercial momentum – launching a 25-unit beta across homes and workspaces, initiating a high-potential commercial pilot with a forecasted contract value of AU$450K, and generating AU$135K in early D2C pre-sales. These early signals support a projected run rate of over AU$1M in ARR as the brand prepares for its national launch.
Auric has gained global recognition, representing Australia at the Entrepreneurship World Cup in Riyadh (Nov 2024), reaching the Supernova Finals at GITEX Asia (April 2025), and being named a HealthTech finalist in the Global Startup Awards (Oceania, Feb 2025). The company was also crowned Australian Startup of the Year in 2024 by the Startup Network.
“Scent has been stuck in the dark ages – no personalisation, no automation. But scent is powerful; it shapes how we feel. I started Auric to make mood personal, effortless, and ambient – using AI, science, and the proven power of natural aromas. Mood is everything,” says Adam Good, CEO of Auric.
Imitation Machines
Founders: Ilya Kuzovkin (CEO), Roger Chao (CCO)
Industry: B2B SaaS | Robotics
Robotics is booming across industries like agriculture, warehousing, and mining but developing intelligent robotic behaviours still demands specialised coding skills and significant time. Deploying robots in real-world settings at scale remains complex and expensive.
Imitation Machines is accelerating robot development through imitation learning-as-a-service, reducing the time and expertise needed to deploy intelligent robotics. Instead of writing code, users demonstrate behaviours via an intuitive human-robot interaction interface. These demonstrations are then translated by the platform into robot-executable autonomous behaviours using reinforcement and imitation learning frameworks.
The team has secured two paid pilots and over $500K in annual LOIs with system integrators and hardware manufacturers. After a successful physical proof-of-concept, Imitation Machines is expanding its offering to cover a broader range of robot forms and use cases.
“We started Imitation Machines because we believe robots should learn as intuitively as humans. Programming robots by hand is slow, expensive, and limits their potential,” says Roger Chao, CCO at Imitation Machines. “By teaching robots through demonstration, we’re unlocking a future where advanced robotics can adapt to real-world needs in days, making automation accessible, flexible, and universal.”
Lodgicl
Founders: Ian Tulloch (CEO), Keith Player (CTO)
Industry: B2B SaaS, InsurTech
Insurance processes such as property and home claims are burdened by time-consuming workflows and legacy systems that demand on-site damage assessments, supply coordination, extensive documentation, and an array of phone calls and emails. This lack of structured data and integration leads to delays, poor customer experiences, and costly inefficiencies for insurers and service providers.
Lodgicl is digitising the home insurance claims supply chain, starting with structured assessments that reduce site visit times by up to 50%. Its mobile-first platform captures structured on-site data, links damage directly to policy terms, and uses proprietary matching IP to produce faster and more accurate assessments.
A paid pilot is live with one of Australia’s largest repairers, and three of the next four top-tier players are already secured for rollout. With insurer conversations underway and security certifications (ISO27001 & SOC2) in progress, Lodgicl is on track to launch its MVP in July 2025.
Ian Tulloch, CEO of Lodgicl after years on both the insurer and supplier side of claims, noticed that “the same challenges kept surfacing: legacy systems, unstructured data, and manual decisions slowing everything down. We created Lodgicl to bring structure to that complexity and connect the insurance supply chain.”
Lodgicl founders Keith Player and Ian Tulloch
PaperLab
Founder: Antonios Meimaris (CEO)
Industry: B2B SaaS | Research
Scientists, R&D teams, and analysts spend an enormous amount of time manually reviewing academic literature and technical documents to extract insights – a process that is slow, error-prone, and overwhelming given the exponential growth of publications.
PaperLab can intelligently summarise, compare, and distil this dense information at scale. Researchers can extract insights from thousands of academic papers simultaneously, slashing the time it takes to synthesise complex literature. Its AI-powered platform targets processes that consume over 69 million hours of labour annually and costs research teams an estimated $7B USD per year. This means more breakthrough discoveries in fields such as climate science and oncology could be just months away – rather than decades.
Since launching its beta, PaperLab has secured a joint pilot across 30 university-led projects and attracted 179 early-access users in one day alone. A pharmaceutical R&D pilot is underway, with applications expanding into clinical research.
“After years building AI tools that could process data but never truly extract the deep insights researchers need, I realised there was a massive gap between raw information and real understanding,” says Antonios Meimaris, the CEO of PaperLab who also holds a Master’s in Decision Making Under Risk & Uncertainty from the University of Liverpool and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Monash University. “I founded PaperLab to empower every researcher, and every organisation, to turn thousands of papers into actionable knowledge in minutes, so we can spend less time sifting through documents and more time driving breakthroughs.”
Prefactor
Founders: Matt Doughty (CEO), Simon Russell (CTO)
Industry: B2B SaaS | Cybersecurity
User authentication and authorisation are still painfully complex and resource-draining for software teams. Engineering teams must weigh up building and maintaining custom solutions – often rigid, error-prone, and expensive – or off-the-shelf tools that either offer simplicity at the cost of flexibility or require heavy lifting to customise.
Offering the first domain-specific language (DSL) built specifically for unified user management, Prefactor allows engineers to define authentication, authorisation, and auditing logic all in one place using their simple integration. By unifying user logic into a single, versioned source of truth, developers can ship faster, reduce risk, and maintain full control over how users access and interact with their applications.
Prefactor’s solution has already attracted 11 Letters of Intent (LOIs) and three design partners spanning Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, USA, and Canada. In March 2025, the team launched its Closed Beta, which includes five core authentication methods – Google Social Auth, Microsoft Entra SSO, Magic Links, One-Time Passcodes, and traditional user/password login – along with the first iteration of its DSL data structure.
“After building auth systems six times across high-growth companies, we started Prefactor: a unified, programmable layer for authentication, authorisation, and audit that scales seamlessly with your codebase,” says Matt Doughty, CEO of Prefactor. “We eliminate the velocity-security tradeoff – giving teams enterprise-grade access control without slowing them down. In a $25B+ market full of legacy bloat, we’re building the platform that gets it right.”
RoundTable
Founders: Ronan Mason (CEO), Sergey Meshkov (CTO)
Industry: ConsumerTech | Creator Economy
In the $250B creator economy, only 4% of the 50 million global creators earn more than $100K. Despite 77% of fans expressing a desire for direct interaction with creators, most platforms are built for passive, one-way engagement (likes, comments, follows). As a result, creators are left without effective tools to monetise their most engaged and valuable audiences – superfans – leaving massive income potential on the table.
RoundTable empowers creators to host live, camera-on video experiences where fans and creators interact face-to-face in real-time. Unlike traditional, passive one-way streams, RoundTable breaks down the barrier that typically separates creators from their audiences, offering fans an immersive, VIP front-row seat to engage directly with their favourite creators.
This two-way, interactive format transforms fan loyalty into high-value, monetisable interactions with creators to deepen engagement and unlock new revenue streams. The result is a uniquely personal and engaging fan experience that goes far beyond simply watching from the sidelines.
RoundTable earns a 20% commission and offers a SaaS platform for talent agencies and companies managing multiple creators. With a beta version just launched, blending live video with seamless ticketing, RoundTable empowers creators to activate superfans and capitalise on untapped demand for real connection.
After over 20 years in music and entertainment, Ronan Mason, CEO of RoundTable, has worked alongside passionate creatives and some of the biggest names in the sector. “With RoundTable, we’re creating new ways for them to earn from their craft – connecting directly with superfans through live video experiences and unlocking a meaningful, sustainable new source of revenue,” Ronan says.
RoundTable founders Sergey Meshkov and Ronan Mason
ViaPay
Founders: Joshua James (CEO), Anton Genkin (CPO)
Industry: B2B SaaS | FinTech
ViaPay modernises business transactions with AI-native automation that replaces outdated manual processes and streamlines the entire order-to-cash cycle.
While front-end e-commerce has evolved, back-end systems have not caught up, bogged down by manual invoicing, rigid processes and delayed payments. This leads to wasted time, errors and unnecessary overhead for businesses on both sides of the transaction.
ViaPay addresses this by automating how businesses manage invoicing, payments and reconciliation. Its platform combines agentic artificial intelligence with customer data to automate workflows and eliminate manual interventions. Businesses get faster payments, fewer errors, and save tens of hours every week on administrative tasks.
ViaPay has secured over 10 Letters of Intent, including an ASX-listed company and a global online marketplace. A live pilot is underway, with further integrations planned in the coming months.
“We started ViaPay because business-to-business payments are stuck in the past,” says Joshua James, CEO of ViaPay. “We saw that businesses are still relying on manual invoicing and outdated payment processes which creates a lot of unnecessary work for buyers and sellers. We’re fixing this. ViaPay brings AI-native automation to streamline transactions, making it easier to do business. Our mission is simple: to make B2B payments feel as effortless as B2C.”
The full portfolio
View more on these companies via Antler’s showcase page.
Founders, Antler wants to meet you.
Applications for Antler’s 14th Australian residency across Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane are now open – offering founders the chance to secure up to AU$260,000 for 12% equity while benefiting from a global network, AI-focused expertise, and follow-on support through ARC.
Learn more and apply here.
- StartupDaily is the official media partner of Antler in Australia.
Trending
Daily startup news and insights, delivered to your inbox.