Coca-Cola Amatil's corporate venture arm, Amatil X, has launched a multi-million dollar fund targeting early stage start-ups with Artesian Venture Partners (13 December). Its first investment is an AI start-up from New Zealand.
Amatil group director of partners and growth Chris Sullivan said the fund would come from existing resources in Amatil X and minority investments in early stage start-ups that meet investment thesis criteria and mandate. It would be managed by Artesian, Sullivan said.
“Artesian are recognised experts in identifying and recommending high quality early-stage start-ups for investment. We’re proud to partner with them in growing start-up ecosystems and scouting for business opportunities for the future,” Sullivan said.
“One focus of Amatil X is to invest in platforms that allow our current and future customers to optimise their business and increase sales,” Mr Sullivan said.
Sullivan said Artesian’s Venture Capital as a Service (VCaaS) platform provides Amatil X with scalable resources and expertise to filter and select the best early stage startups across Amatil’s territories.
Artesian managing partner Jeremy Colless said the partnership between the two companies was a “new wave of corporate innovation” that could access R&D being carried out by “thousands of early stage start-ups across the region”.
“By investing in a portfolio of best-of-breed early stage startups, Amatil X has access to a pre-screened and de-risked pipeline from which they may choose to make strategic, later stage investments,” Colless said.
It’s first minority investment is in a New Zealand-based start-up Aider. It has developed an artificial intelligence digital assistant for SMEs to access customer and business data insights in real-time.
Sullivan said: “Voice-activated commerce will contribute more than $80 billion per year to global economies by 2023, and we’re enthusiastic about encouraging its rollout in our region.
“Aider fits the bill. It brings together all aspects of a business owner’s data to optimise returns and helps the retailer better match data with instinct in daily business decisions.”
Aider co-founder and CFO Pete Weaver said the digital assistant was like having a rock-star employee.
“Aider starts with a conversation. Via text or voice-assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, a business owner can simply ask Aider real time questions like “what was my top-seller last week?”, “what will my sales look like next week?” or “what was my wage cost vs. revenue last month?”, and Aider returns a prompt answer,” he said.
“Aider is homegrown technology which has been in market in New Zealand for one year, and now has over two hundred customers from local retailers to Westpac Bank NZ. We aim to grow Aider’s presence in New Zealand and Australia, and then look at other markets.”
