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Flowing Bee, an AI-powered platform that helps advertisers and marketers better understand consumer behaviour, has raised $1.6 million in an oversubscribed round led by Archangel Ventures.
The investment, which was also backed by The University of Melbourne Genesis Pre-Seed Fund, Antler, LaunchVic’s Alice Anderson Fund and M8 Ventures, will be used to further develop the platform’s capabilities and expand the Melbourne-based startup’s team.
Flowing Bee says the success of the investment round reflects confidence in the company’s mission to help brands create “effective, science-led campaigns at unprecedented speed".
"Brands waste billions on ineffective campaigns because they fail to activate the true psychological drivers of consumer behaviour," says Flowing Bee’s CEO Michael Sankey, who co-founded the company with Sara Khorasani in 2023.
"Our platform combines proven behavioural science and AI to bridge this gap, delivering deep audience insights and automated campaign creation at scale."
The new capital will be used to advance Flowing Bee’s AI-driven behavioural insights engine and its automated campaign-creation capabilities, while also accelerating customer growth in Australia and the US.
Flowing Bee, which is already working with ASX-listed companies, also plans to expand its team in engineering, data science and go-to-market roles, while laying the groundwork to make the technology widely accessible to SMEs.
"In a world where ad content and placement are increasingly commoditised by algorithms and AI, we love solutions that solve more complex problems within enterprise and provide deeper insights into historically siloed data,” says Andrew Cicutto, principal at Archangel Ventures.
“Michael and Sara are uniquely positioned at the intersection of behavioural psychology and cutting-edge AI, and we’re incredibly excited to watch Flowing Bee empower brands to move at the speed of culture."
Flowing Bee merges behavioural science and AI to streamline marketing decision-making. The startup’s technology leverages Khorasani’s experience as a Formula 1 simulation engineer and Sankey’s 15 years as a behavioural scientist helping ASX100 and Fortune 500 brands understand and drive customer behaviour.
"Investing in Flowing Bee represents our commitment to nurturing the next wave of AI innovation emerging from our university ecosystem,” says Hun Gan, CEO at University of Melbourne Genesis Pre-Seed Fund.
“Their behavioural AI technology showcases exactly the kind of groundbreaking research-to-market transition that our fund was designed to catalyse.
“As we look ahead, it's increasingly clear that university-born startups will play a pivotal role in solving tomorrow's challenges, yet they often struggle to secure that critical first round of funding.
“By bridging this gap, we're not just backing individual companies, we're helping to create sustainable innovation pathways from academic excellence to market impact."
Flowing Bee applies its technology to survey a target audience, extract actionable behavioural insights and generate optimised marketing campaigns, all within 48 hours. The startup says this eliminates traditional manual research bottlenecks, allowing marketing teams to focus on strategic and creative execution.
"Our goal is to remove the guesswork from marketing, starting with enterprises and eventually making this technology accessible to small and medium-sized businesses worldwide," says Sankey.
James McClure, partner at Antler Australia, says the founding team at Flowing Bee brings a “formidable mix of behavioural science, deep domain expertise and commercial drive” which he says is “exactly what’s needed to crack this otherwise saturated market”.
“Michael’s background as a behavioural scientist working with ASX100 and Fortune 500 brands gives him an unmatched understanding of how to apply psychology to marketing,” says McClure.
“Meanwhile, Sara has taken her engineering experience from Formula 1 simulations to AI systems, giving Flowing Bee the technical firepower to achieve pole position. This is a breakthrough product that’s made possible by what we believe is the ideal team to build and scale it.”
Emily Rich, Partner at M8 Ventures, sees Flowing Bee’s platform as representing a fundamental shift in how brands understand and connect with their audiences.
“We're backing a team that's not just creating incremental improvements but reimagining the foundation of effective marketing itself," says Rich.
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