Instant nets $2.2m pre-seed, with an eye towards building a frictionless economy
Today we announced our three-times oversubscribed, $2.2m pre-seed funding round, led by Blackbird Ventures, alongside Reinventure (Westpac’s Venture Capital Fund), Steve Baxter’s TEN13, Accel Capital’s scout fund, and significant angel investors including Larry Diamond (CEO & Co-Founder of Zip Co), Justin Mateen (Co-Founder of Tinder) and more. We’re proud and grateful to have strong backing, validating our confident vision and joining us early on our journey, in bringing the future of a frictionless economy alive.
Firstly, this wouldn’t have been possible without the support of our investors, early customers, my co-founder Will (legend!), our first software engineer Patrick Macpherson, our amazing advisors Matthew Bright and Brandon Sheppard, of course the support of my parents, Peter and Ann Millward, and the latest addition to our killer team, Rick Hill.
Starting the journey of Instant whilst studying at 17, sure has been a fun, wild and pretty fast-paced challenge. This funding round really marks day 1 for me and us as a team. The feeling of entering 2022 after raising Australia’s largest pre-seed round is purely amazing, and the quality of our cap table, well, that’s even better!
Checkout is universally frustrating, and we’re solving that. Our mission is to build the future of a frictionless economy, transforming billions of complex checkouts, into 1-tap shopping experiences globally. We will create a world where the experience of checkout is effortless, anywhere and everywhere across the internet. Instant will empower sellers to ensure they have the opportunity to win, not just at checkout, but across data, payments, social commerce, and more, making buying online fun, rewarding and instant for their Gen Z shoppers. We’re the instantaneous payment layer of the internet, giving merchants the infrastructure they need to significantly uplift their sales — simply.
Instant works agnostic to a seller’s technology stack, browser or platform, and can easily cater to the most complex, customised checkout use cases, on any ecommerce stores — or even give creators and influencers the opportunity to sell, directly from Instagram for example. We speed shoppers through checkout, no matter where, when or how they are shopping. And for a seller, we’re like an ‘Amazon Marketplace’ of commerce products for merchants, filling the gaps. Anywhere you complete a transaction, you’ll be simply and easily doing it with Instant.
We began building Instant around April/May 2021, and now, just 8 months later, are excited to have already started rapidly expanding, in helping sellers improve the online buying experience for their customers.
We’re excited for the journey ahead, and are again thankful for Blackbird and Niki Scevak for embarking on this journey, alongside (and in no particular order) Simon Cant from Reinventure, Brandan Hill, Stew Glynn and Steve Baxter from TEN13, Accel Ventures Scout Fund, Larry Diamond (Co-Founder and CEO of Zip Co), Justin Mateen (Co-Founder of Tinder), Huey Lin (Founding COO of Affirm), Luca Ascani, Simone Mancini (Founder of Scalapay), Ming You See, Jameson Lee, Lynton Pipkorn, Yuan Chen, Thomson Nguyen (Founder of Hatch), my mum and dad, Peter and Ann Millward, our early customers, in particular Global Footcare’s Jeff Coombridge and Nathan Coombridge, and so many more for their valuable, trusted support.
We’re Instant, and this, is just the start of our journey as we bring the world’s simplest way to pay to the core of every online shopping journey. We’re so excited to now double down on making this a reality, and would love for you to join us! Software Engineers, keen? Hit us up :)
Liam.
