If you thought that there seemed to be more Aussie generative AI startups than you could shake a stick at, you’re right, says Tim O’Neill, co-founder of Time Under Tension. What’s more, he thinks there’s quite a good reason why.
To a surprising degree, many Australian generative AI start-ups are leading the way with tools for marketing teams and agencies. And interestingly, the founders can be found spread all around this lucky country.
The Sydney headquartered generative AI start-up Leonardo.AI became hugely popular, and in July was acquired by Canva for a reported $370 million. Their text-to-image functionality is now available within Canva, with Leonardo continuing to operate as its own brand and app.
In the past year, Noosa-based Springboards.ai have signed up more than 100 marketing and advertising agencies to their gen AI insights and creativity app. Springboards helps agencies to do brand strategy, research, insights and create campaign ideas all powered by generative AI.
Meanwhile, more than 250,000 websites have been designed and built using Relume, a Sydney start-up that offers an AI-powered website builder. It promises to “Effortlessly generate sitemaps and wireframes for marketing websites in minutes.”
Melbourne-based Cuttable received a lot of press recently with news that they had raised a whopping $5.5 million in venture capital, to accelerate their automated content agency. Co-founder Sam Kroonenburg was quoted as saying “Our vision is to bring the craft back into digital advertising so that we can make it possible to produce ads that people really love, and really respect at scale by combining automation with AI.”
Heatseeker (founders Kate and Fiona live in Sydney and the Gold Coast respectively) uses gen AI to help marketing and growth teams run market tests, and recently closed a $1.5m seed round. They are having great success, providing a growth engine for businesses that need a self-serve way to run data experiments.
NightCafe (headquartered in Cairns) is an incredibly popular AI image and video generation app, and although less known than Leonardo, has amassed fans to the tune of more than a million users a month, who have created nearly a billion images with its tools.
And finally, here at Time Under Tension we have just launched a software product Peak that is built to help marketing teams complete common tasks faster with the help of generative AI.
My question is; why is Australia such a hotbed of talent in the particular niche of “generative AI apps for marketing”?
I spoke to some of the founders of the companies above to get their opinion, and the results were interesting.
Fiona Triaca from Heatseeker attributes this success to Australia’s focus on practical innovation, saying “As a country, we’re big on innovation, but we’re also very practical – companies here want results, not just hype”.
This relates to Pip Bingemann from Springboards’ view that adoption of local start-ups from local businesses is easier in Australia than in larger markets like the US. Decision-making is quicker, and word of mouth spreads quickly. The flip side of this is the size of the Australian market, with most of the startups here having expanded Internationally very quickly after proving themselves first here.
An additional perspective from Angus Russell, founder of NightCafe, was the ready access to capital for AI startups, in his view “another reason for the Aussie successes is probably that the Australian VC scene is so much better now than it was 5 or 10 years ago, and the VCs are (or were 1-2 years ago) hungry for GenAI companies to invest in.”
Innovative (but practical) founders, with a market willing to give them a shot, and ready access to capital. Collectively these help to explain why Australia has been, and will continue to be a great place for Australian marketing startups, using generative AI to power insights, market test ideas, create content, and generate marketing assets.
