Early-stage investment firm Antler Australia recently backed a new cohort of startups as part of its ongoing program to build great local tech companies.
Startup Daily shares the details of each venture in the “Antler Investor Memos” series. is designed to give you a fast, keen understanding of the startups and people involved, with many seeking follow-up capital beyond Antler’s initial pre-seed investment.
Company: Acanthis
Date of incorporation: 2022
Stage of business: Pre-seeding
founders: Dan Sammut and Troy Haddon
Current investors: antlers
Currently increase: Yes
Company
Small business data is often fragmented across multiple platforms, which takes time and money to analyze and gain insights. Acanthisan integrated SaaS web application, provides small business owners with insights to monitor the impact of their strategies and make informed decisions to grow their business and ultimately track their business value in real time.
By integrating financial and non-financial data from multiple systems ranging from cloud accounting software, sales channels and advertising platforms, Acanthis’s intelligent decision-making model provides clear and actionable insights for small business owners. As it scales, the machine learning model will be able to better understand what actions companies take to provide more informed insights by leveraging natural language processing. This level of insight is typically reserved for larger organizations with budget allowances for expensive analytics platforms.
By taking the time out of analyzing operations or the expense of seeking outside consultants, Acanthis empowers business owners to make informed decisions in real time and free up valuable resources to focus on day-to-day operations.
Antler investment thesis
“As a Chartered Accountant, Dean is well acquainted with the challenges small business owners face in integrating their data and gaining insights they can use. This, combined with Troy’s technical expertise, gave us the belief that Acanthis is well positioned to help small business owners make informed decisions,” said Bede Moore, Antler APAC Managing Partner.
“We believe there is an opportunity to provide small business owners with a tailored product that is competitive in both price and user experience, especially for older businesses moving to cloud-based computing and next-generation software.
“As Acanthis strengthens its product offering with a user-owned MVP, we see a path for the company to generate revenue within a short time frame.”
Traction/milestones, so far
Within a few months, Acanthis has added more than 100 SME customers to the waiting list. The MVP is in the hands of customers for beta testing and to achieve this it has expanded its development team.
Resources for due diligence
Discover Acanthis’ pitch video and investor deck at The Antler Portfolio Reveal platform.
Latest financing
Antler preseed
Use of Funds
The initial investment from Antler Australia accelerated the growth of Acanthis’s development team, increasing the workforce with two full-stack developers in addition to CTO Troy Haddon. This has resulted in Acanthis’s ability to rapidly develop its MVP and accelerate time to market.
The founders say
“For most of the past decade, I’ve been helping small businesses build more valuable businesses. On the front lines of small business accounting, I saw the pitfalls owners face in understanding their data beyond their limited resources, time and money. Our vision is to develop a scalable and affordable solution to help all small businesses create more valuable businesses,” said Dean Sammut, co-founder of Acanthis.
“Millions of small businesses worldwide deserve the same level of visibility and insights that only larger organizations currently have access to. At Acanthis, we are on a mission to change that.”
“The stars aligned to bring this vision to life when I met my co-founder Troy Haddon at Antler, a leading CTO with a deep understanding of data analytics and ML. Aside from Antler’s initial investment, the exceptional team helped us refine the idea of turning chaos into clarity. And ultimately making Acanthis a global company backed by venture capital.”
What’s next?
Antler, an early-stage global VC, recently showcased the latest investments it has made in aspiring Australian founders and startups. Acanthis was one of Antler Australia’s newest portfolio companies.
Learn how Acanthis provides visibility and guidance to small businesses through the Antler Portfolio Disclosure Platform.
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