Early stage funding firm Antler Australia not too long ago backed a brand new cohort of startups as a part of its ongoing program to construct nice native tech corporations.
Startup Each day is sharing the main points of every enterprise within the “Antler Investor Memos” collection, which is designed to provide you a fast, sharp understanding of the startups and folks concerned, with many in search of comply with up capital following Antler’s preliminary pre-seed funding.
Firm title: Focia
Formation date: 2022
Stage of enterprise: Pre-Seed
Founders: Mika Siddiqui and Umesh Wimalawardana
Present buyers: Antler
At present elevating: Sure
Description of enterprise
The creator financial system is now estimated to be price over US$100 billion with 165 million creators becoming a member of the worldwide trade within the final two years alone, in keeping with the newest information from Adobe.
The speedy development of the creator financial system has seen folks throughout industries, geographies and backgrounds growing platforms to precise themselves, domesticate an engaged viewers, and finally, monetise their content material. For 2-thirds of creators, nonetheless, it usually takes three years to construct and develop their on-line viewers.
The all-in-one creator financial system platform, Focia, allows creators and entrepreneurs to show their concepts into extremely participating content material by predicting the efficiency and engagement of posts, suggesting content material enhancements earlier than being posted and utilising generative AI to help within the creation of content material concepts.
Powered by generative AI and machine studying, Focia creates and optimises bespoke content material for creators, and predicts which posts will carry out one of the best. It’s proprietary fashions forecast which content material audiences need to have interaction with and optimises new posts accordingly.
For a lot of creators the adjustments to social media algorithms have impacted how their content material is found, Focia’s know-how helps creators predict rising developments, adapt content material to algorithmic preferences, and create focused participating posts.
Antler funding thesis
“Mika and Umesh deliver the distinctive technical functionality required on this house and impressed us with the standard of their output and tempo of execution. Glorious workforce dynamics and customary values date again to their shared expertise as highschoolers in New Zealand,” stated Cath Rogers, Accomplice at Antler Australia.
“We invested within the enterprise when the product demonstrated improved Instagram engagement for photos and it has since developed to service different codecs, social media channels, improved generative functionality and added scheduling making the product extra related to enterprise customers similar to companies along with particular person creators”.
Traction/milestones
Since launching its beta product, Focia now analyses over 20,000 photos per week and has 1,000 customers signed as much as its waitlist From analysing engagement of customers pre and publish utilizing Focia, a median of 15% uplift in engagement was proven.
One creator and person of Focia was in a position to amass over 1M complete likes on their TikTok account with the assistance of Focia’s trending analytics. With Focia’s proprietary modelling, a typical approach referred to as cross-validation was used to find out an accuracy fee of 80% for engagement predictions.
Newest funding
Pre-Seed from Antler
Use of funds
Focia secured Antler’s Pre-Seed funding late final 12 months, it has leveraged this preliminary funding to launch its beta app in market, develop generative AI capabilities to create content material, construct its predictive class mannequin, and finalise its in-platform editor.
The founders say
“There at present aren’t any sources of reality for creators and understanding how varied platform’s algorithms work can really feel like a bet for many creators,” stated Mika Siddiqui, cofounder of Focia.
“Aspiring creators usually require assist rising their viewers. Our proprietary modelling not solely predicts which content material will carry out one of the best, it additionally discovers rising developments, optimises and even creates content material to focus on this. Our all-in-one platform seeks to assist creators by way of each facet of the journey.
“At Focia, our final ambition is to turn out to be the one platform that each aspiring creator must develop. We are going to broaden from predicting what works to permitting creators to edit, collaborate and monetise all inside one platform.
“Antler has offered us with teaching periods and workshops which were extraordinarily pivotal in the way in which we run our startup. The truth that now we have entry to the Antler neighborhood has particularly been useful in understanding methods to develop our startup and what instructions to take.”
What’s subsequent?
Antler, a world early-stage VC, is revealing all its newest investments made in bold Australian founders and startups. With over 100 investments in early-stage corporations, Focia is one in all its most up-to-date portfolio corporations.