Australian venture capital firms Blackbird Ventures and Felicis have co-led an A$11.5 million ($7.5 million) seed round for security startup Redactive AI, while Malaysia’s pitchIN has launched the country’s first equity crowdfunding secondary market.
Australia’s Redactive AI raises seed funding
Australian startup Redactive AI, which provides a developer platform to help enterprises securely adopt generative AI (GenAI), has announced raising a $7.5 million seed round co-led by Blackbird Ventures and Felicis.
Atlassian Ventures and automation unicorn Zapier backed the funding. Redactive will use the capital to expand its engineering, customer success, and marketing teams and scale its operations in the US.
Founded in September 2023 by Andrew Pankevicius, Alexander Valente, and Lucas Sargent, the Melbourne-based startup aims to address the lack of AI engineering and security skillsets within enterprise software teams. Pankevicius and Valente are both former Atlassian executives.
“The open-source community was filled with incredible projects that showed what this next generation of AI could do. We saw first-hand how enterprises with fragmented data repositories and complex security controls would struggle to adopt bespoke generative AI agents and applications without their very specific, dynamic security needs being fulfilled to get these use cases into production,” said Redactive co-founder Pankevicius in a prepared statement.
The company says its platform allows clients’ engineering teams to build powerful GenAI applications with their organisation’s data, supports their security team in reducing threats, and helps leaders manage these applications responsibly.
Redactive claims it is working with two large Australian financial services institutions to scale their GenAI use cases to over 500 employees each.
pitchIN to launch secondary trading market
Malaysian equity crowdfunding hub pitchIN is launching a secondary trading market, PSTX, to enable traders to buy shares in companies that have previously raised funds on its platform.
The secondary market will operate on a cash upfront basis whereby users wanting to trade will have to ensure that the necessary funds are in their accounts before they place bids. PSTX is free to use and will be available on July 10.
The first 10 companies to be traded on the new platform include Commerce.Asia, Gobuilders Netsoft, Mereka Innovative and Goobat.
Founded in 2015, pitchIN says it has assisted over 177 businesses in collectively raising over 325 million ringgit via crowdfunding.
“Introducing PSTX is the next natural step for us to realise our vision of becoming a complete fundraising and investing hub for private companies. We decided to introduce PSTX because it benefits both investors and the businesses themselves as investors can choose to exit while businesses can gain new backers even when they are not actively fundraising,” said pitchIN chief executive Sam Shafie.
