Three ANZ startups that raised more than $74 million this week

Retail crime is the big winner in the funding scene this week. Well, the prevention of it. SaaS startup Auror has raised a whopping $72.6 million in a Series C, with ADR and Matched also getting some fresh cash injections.

Auror: $72.6 million

Launched in New Zealand in 2012, Auror has developed crime reporting and intelligence software that is utilised by 40% of the Aussie retail market, including some of the biggest brands in Australia, including Coles, Bunnings, and Woolworths. It’s also utilised by over 3,000 law enforcement agencies worldwide. 

The funding round was led by Axon Enterprise Inc, Reinventure and Woolworth’s venture arm W23 Global. Plans for the raise include expanding into North America and the UK, as well as further R&D investment.

The pitch is that the Auror platform is designed to cut down on the billions of dollars lost to retail theft every year. It does this by giving businesses a place to log incidents and upload information that can be shared with the police via an ‘evidence box’ feature.

In addition to written information, the likes of CCTV, images, social media content and license plates can be uploaded to the platform.

From there, users can scour reports for information such as products stolen, people’s names, locations and times.

Machine learning is also utilised by the platform to find and track individuals across reports. Facial recognition isn’t used, but physical descriptions can be searched (minus race) and the platform can search footage and photographs to find and link an individual to multiple incident reports.

From there, mobile notifications can be sent to users if someone has been clocked at other stores, for example. This also works for license plates.

The idea is to try and prevent future crime. However, the platform has faced some scrutiny due to being a private company with a large surveillance network that can track people, with connection to the police and a potential lack of oversight.

Some measures have been put in place to combat these concerns, including automatic facial redaction of people that appear in uploaded footage when they are not persons of interest.

However, there are also concerns over previous misuse of the platform. As reported last year, the New Zealand police accessed Auror’s licence plate recognition tech by falsely reporting a car as stolen. The reason for this was to track individuals who were involved in a COVID-19 lockdown.

Last year Greens senator David Shoebridge called for Parliament to examine the increasing use of the platform in Australia.

ADR: $2 million

Brisbane-based startup ADR has raised $2 million for its mining robots. The round was led by Resource Capital Funds.

ADR develops 30kg robots specifically for challenging conditions underground. They are able to go into these spaces in order to monitor and collect data among other mining equipment.

Its value operation lies not only with its sensors and data collection technology, but because it can do this without operations having to cease or machinary needing to be isolated. According to ADR, this means time and dollars are saved through increased efficiency.

It also says this improve human safety as less operators need to be exposed to hazardous conditions.

Matched: under $500,000

Earlier this week we reported on the launch of Matched — a platform designed to pair up ‘learners’ and ‘trainers’ for professional mentorship and knowledge sharing. The business model revolves around Matched taking a percentage of the fee from each session.

The startup was founded by Jessica Box and Susan Hion-Jarvis (formerly at Linktree) and investors include LaunchVic’s Alice Anderson Fund and FB10xAdVentures as part of an angel round.

In an interview with SmartCompany, co-founder Jessica Box wouldn’t confirm an exact launch funding figure, but did say it was under $500,000.

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