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Tackling the slow and complex world of business valuations, Melbourne-based business advisory platform Emanda has secured $300,000 in a pre-seed round to streamline the process for startups and growing companies.
Founded by Peter Gatt and Emily Grinton, the platform enables users to create AI-powered data rooms, conduct technical due diligence and produce financial valuations in as little as 15 minutes.
The platform can also connect to tools a company may already use, such as Xero, HubSpot and Google Drive, while integration with Dropbox and OneDrive is also being developed.
The pre-seed funding round received support from Sydney-based tech startup VC M8 Ventures, early-stage fund Torus Ventures, local firm Melbourne Angels and several individual angel investors.
Speaking with Business News Australia, Gatt shared that the co-founders have been using the funds to complete the development stretch so the product can aggressively go to market.
“The real heart and soul of what we want the product to be needed a bit more development. So that money was to do the last of the development stretch…it gets us all guns blazing on go to market,” he said.
“We just want to make sure that really great businesses are set up to one day get a really great exit. We're just really trying to solve that problem. We're on a mission.
“I just want to show [the investors] what we're doing with it transparently and also get them excited about the product.”
Emanda currently has roughly 180 customers using the platform, with 20-30 using paid tiers that include features such as quarterly validated business valuations, third-party access management and business and product technology assessments. To date, three companies have had successful exits after using Emanda to run transactions in the AI-powered data room.
The startup has signed more than 50 referral partners, the majority being accounting, legal and M&A firms.
When asked about whether the platform accounted for the different expectations and benchmarks across industries, Gatt said Emanda is continuing to collect data that informs those distinctions.
“We have to be industry agnostic…the platform is really smart. We actually create customised metrics, numbers and approaches for every single industry that's out there,” he explained.
“At the moment, we're supporting over 140 different industries. Nothing stops us from having over 8,000 - we've built some new technology recently to basically collect more and more data.
“That means that we can talk with a bit more authority around industry comparables and the like inside the platform.”
Grinton ran the deal for M8 Ventures, alongside Kane Templeton and Jason Atkins at Torus Ventures and Frank Walker at Melbourne Angels.
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