Early stage funding firm Antler Australia just lately 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 small print of every enterprise within the “Antler Investor Memos” sequence, 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 identify: Focia 

Formation date: 2022

Stage of enterprise: Pre-Seed

Founders: Mika Siddiqui and Umesh Wimalawardana 

Present traders: Antler

At present elevating: Sure

Description of enterprise

The creator economic 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 accordance with the newest information from Adobe.  

The fast development of the creator economic system has seen folks throughout industries, geographies and backgrounds creating  platforms to specific themselves, domesticate an engaged viewers, and in the end, 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 economic system platform, Focia, permits 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 the most effective. It’s proprietary fashions forecast which content material audiences wish to have interaction with and optimises new posts accordingly. 

For a lot of creators the modifications to social media  algorithms have impacted how their content material is found, Focia’s expertise helps creators predict rising tendencies, adapt content material to algorithmic preferences, and create focused participating posts. 

Antler funding thesis

“Mika and Umesh carry the distinctive technical functionality required on this house and impressed us with the standard of their output and tempo of execution. Wonderful workforce dynamics and customary values date again to their shared expertise as highschoolers in New Zealand,” mentioned Cath Rogers, Associate at Antler Australia.

“We invested within the enterprise when the product demonstrated improved Instagram engagement for photos and it has since advanced to service different codecs, social media channels, improved generative functionality and added scheduling making the product extra related to enterprise customers akin 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 submit utilizing Focia, a median of 15% uplift in engagement was proven.

One creator and person of Focia was capable of amass over 1M whole likes on their TikTok account with the assistance of Focia’s trending analytics. With Focia’s proprietary modelling, a standard approach referred to as cross-validation was used to find out an accuracy price of 80% for engagement predictions.

Newest funding

Pre-Seed from Antler

Use of funds

Focia secured Antler’s Pre-Seed funding late final yr, 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 are not any sources of fact for creators and understanding how varied platform’s algorithms work can really feel like a raffle for many creators,” mentioned 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 the most effective, it additionally discovers rising tendencies, optimises and even creates content material to focus on this. Our all-in-one platform seeks to assist creators by each side of the journey. 

“At Focia, our final ambition is to change into the one platform that each aspiring creator must develop. We’ll broaden from predicting what works to permitting creators to edit, collaborate and monetise all inside one platform.

“Antler has supplied us with teaching classes and workshops which were extraordinarily pivotal in the way in which we run our startup. The truth that we’ve got entry to the Antler neighborhood has particularly been useful in understanding tips on how to develop our startup and what instructions to take.”

What’s subsequent?

Antler, a worldwide early-stage VC, is revealing all its newest investments made in formidable Australian founders and startups. With over 100 investments in early-stage corporations, Focia is certainly one of its most up-to-date portfolio corporations.