$2.2m for teenage tech founders

Blackbird Ventures has led a $2.2 million pre-seed funding round for its youngest founders to date, William Gao, 19, and Liam Millward, 18.

Gao and Millward are the founders of online checkout software platform Instant which was launched to a trial group of retailers late last year.

The round, which is one of the largest pre-seed rounds ever raised in Australia, has been supported by Reinventure, Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen and Zip founder Larry Diamond.

Despite their youth, Gao and Millward have tech sector experience. Gao spent some of his school holidays working for logistics software company WiseTech Global (ASX: WTC) before going on to study computer science and founding his first online sales business. Millward had already launched business ventures including an online store by the time he finished his Year 12 studies at 16.

The teenagers each recognised the same problem in online sales; abandoned shopping carts. That is what they are seeking to solve with Instant, by reducing the number of points at which a transaction can fail.

Rather than having to enter their details each time they want to make a purchase, online shoppers who sign up for Instant fill out their details once. Then, whenever they purchase from a retailer or service provider linked to Instant, they can enter their details with one click.

According to Gao and Millward, Instant makes the online checkout procedure 15x faster and can result in up to a 70% increase in sale conversions.

The seed funding is intended to enable Instant to quickly build up a client base of retailers. Beyond that, Gao and Millard intend to develop additional tools to reduce friction in e-commerce.

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Gao and Millard came to Blackbird’s attention when they applied for the Startmate accelerator program last year. They were not selected but when Blackbird reconnected later, they had made significant progress and were ready to pitch for funding.

Law firm Herbert Smith Freehills advised Instant on the transaction.

Image: The Instant purchasing process in two screenshots.