A new trans-Tasman AI startup, Aether, has raised $3.8 million to help transform how marketing managers build presentations and share institutional knowledge.
Aether (pronounced ‘ether’) aims to help large organisations solve three pervasive issues: Institutional amnesia where valuable data insights are lost or under-utilised, wasted productivity on repetitive research production, and outdated information embedded in static decks.
The business has launched out of its stealth mode with help from New+Improved, the venture studio behind Tracksuit and Ideally. Its seed round has been led by Icehouse Ventures and it has additional backing from Brand Fund 2.
Aether said it has already secured contracts with major enterprise customers across Australia, New Zealand and the US and it generates more than $600,000 in annual recurring revenue.
“They say measure twice, cut once, and this should also be true of marketing workflows. As it stands, most slide decks are recut every time a presentation happens, wasting valuable resources from internal teams,” said Carsten Grueber, co-founder and CEO of Aether.
“Aether transforms presentations from static documents into living, connected assets that are accurate, always up-to-date, and ready to share. Instead of marketers spending half a week building the monthly performance report, they can spend that same time doing the actual marketing itself,” added the ex-Facebook and TikTok boss.
The company’s software integrates live data directly into presentation and document workflows, eliminating the manual copy-paste grind that can consume up to 40 per cent of marketers’ time.
Once plugged into data sources, including Microsoft and Google sources, Aether creates customisable presentations using a business’ branding within minutes and allows them to be effortlessly updated as the underlying data is refreshed.
It said it hopes to change how marketing teams work together, similar to how Figma and Notion have increased collaboration and connectivity in design and project management.
Aether told B&T it has a purpose-built context architecture: document parsing and enrichment, retrieval tuned for marketing tasks, strategy frameworks, slide/page templates, and the PowerPoint generation stack.
It added its model-agnostic and its differentiation comes from its context pipeline and outputs that marketers can actually use.
“That’s why generic AI slide tools struggle, while Aether delivers production-ready work,” the company added.
Early Aether customers are using the platform for board packs, quarterly business reviews, campaign reports, agency briefs and knowledge management – tasks that traditionally drain resources and delay decision-making.
“In minutes, Aether can take 150 marketing reports, in 12 different languages and distil it all down to the 10 slides that actually matter; assess and strengthen your latest idea, plan or brief against your marketing strategy; or create exec-ready presentations reporting last month’s performance with key charts and commentary,” said Grueber.
The founding team brings deep expertise in scaling and commercialising SaaS businesses. Ursula von Keisenberg, Aether’s co-founder, previously served as ANZ managing director at Timely and emerging markets sales lead at Xero Asia.
CRO Daniel Alexander-Head rounds out the executive team after his time at Qualtrics as regional sales manager APJ and Vision Critical as VP sales.
