Early-stage investor Galileo Ventures has made a $240,000 pre-seed investment in WiseList, a Melbourne start-up that offers an online groceries comparison app.
The founder of WiseList is software engineer and first-time entrepreneur Adrian Lu. Lu wondered why, despite having comparison sites for many products and services, Australia did not have an app that provided near real-time pricing for grocery items.
Lu created WiseList to increase consumer choice in Australia’s $122 billion groceries market by providing comparison pricing across multiple stores.
According to Galileo, the main reason a groceries comparison app had not previously been developed in Australia was the dominance of the market by just two players, Coles and Woolworths.
The Galileo team met Lu as he was developing his concept at Monash University’s The Generator. They are now backing his belief that consumers want to be able to compare what their shopping lists will cost at the two major supermarkets as well as elsewhere, plus the differences in pricing on individual items.
The WiseList app has built up more than 50,000 users so far without any marketing spend.