Ten Australian startups have been awarded a combined $1 million in funding from Airwallex, in the first cohort of the fintech’s Latitude 37 program.
Announced by Airwallex co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang in April, Latitude 37 offers $100,000 in equity-free funding to AI-focused startups.
The program also promises ongoing support to those startups, including on-site visits to Singapore and San Francisco, where Airwallex is co-headquartered, and access to Airwallex’s broad network of customers and investors.
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Businesses included in the first cohort are working in diverse fields, spanning robotics to on-road hazard detection, and financial services.
Successful applicants include Polarbear AI, the Melbourne-based startup building tools that help Australian students study for exams, receive essay feedback, and estimate VCE ATAR results.
Inspired by the experience of building HZ Tutoring, co-founders Haobo Zhang and Percy Ding say the edtech startup is preparing for the schooling needs of Generation Beta.
SeatFinder, from Yaroslava Kiseleva and Nicholas Van Hoorick, aggregates seat availability across commercial airlines, pledging to help travellers find top-end seats for economy-class prices.
And Superstat, founded by Kai Bloomfield, Cordelia King, and Sam Hung, hopes to provide sporting teams with elite-level performance metrics, gleaned from video footage.
Superstat recently raised $3.5 million from a suite of investors, showing Latitude 37’s willingness to back startups that already have promising trajectories.
Its selection panel is a who’s who of the Australian startup scene, further highlighting the programme’s focus on startups already proving their mettle among big-name investors.
“Looking at the founders we selected, one thing stood out: young people across Australia are building incredibly ambitious and technically difficult things with AI,” said Zhang, in a Friday statement.
The programme’s purpose is to “make sure building a globally significant company from Australia isn’t the harder path,” he added.
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“This is our first Latitude 37 cohort, but the ambition goes well beyond 10 companies,” said Airwallex president and co-founder Lucy Liu.
“We want to build a community that helps Australia’s most ambitious founders move faster, think globally and build companies from Australia that compete on the world stage.”
Other startups in the first Latitude 37 cohort include:
- AXIOMS, founded by Manu Masson and Lochlan Hill, building AI agent networks,
- Blank Robotics, founded by Jed Hoo and Anirudhh “Arnie” Ramesh, focused on modular robots for the grocery retail sector,
- Dreamscale Labs, founded by Eric Ren, Chris Yoo, Antoine Nguyen and Kevin Lin, combining the worlds of AI and robotics with its ‘Dropbear’ cloud inference tool,
- Forward, from Daniel Yoon, Riley Janjis and Darryl Luo, turning AI on complex borrower information in the private credit space,
- Geospan, founded by Julia Tan and Beau Hobba, designing “road intelligence” that detects traffic obstacles, with the goal of making driving safer,
- Kronus, from Patrick Bellamy and Jack Ulbrich-Baker, developing essential safety software for the aerospace sector,
- and SyncPay, from Ezana Yohala, a startup that hopes to attach detailed data points to individual payments, making accounting faster and easier.
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