Two ANZ startups that raised $60.4 million this week
Edtech and robotics are the flavours of the week when it comes to startup funding deals.
Edtech and robotics are the flavours of the week when it comes to startup funding deals.
New Zealand-founded Crimson Education has secured a sizeable Series D capital raise, while robotics startup Nexobot has scored pre-seed funding.
Keep reading to learn more.
Crimson: $60 million
Edtech startup Crimson Education has joined an elite group of New Zealand tech companies to reach unicorn status, after completing a NZ$67 million ($60 million) Series D funding round.
Led by Movac, the funding round values Crimson at more than NZ$1 billion, giving it a place in the New Zealand unicorn club along with the likes of former members Xero and Rocket Lab. It also represents one of the largest ever funding rounds for a New Zealand-founded company.
Among the other investors to back Crimson in the round were HEAL Partners, Five Sigma, Icehouse Ventures, US News and HighSage Ventures.
Founded in 2013 by Jamie Beaton, Sharndre Kushor, and Fangzhou Jiang, Crimson aims to help students gain entry into some of the world’s best universities, including Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, and Ivy League institutions in the US such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT.
Its platform offers college admissions consulting, tutoring, academic acceleration and extracurricular activities, with students typically working with Crimson consultants over a number of years to help achieve their education goals.
The company, which says its annual revenue now exceeds US$100 million, has 22 offices across five continents and has bolstered its operations by acquiring a number of other education businesses, including NumberWorks’nWords, Revision Village, and Collegewise.
Crimson plans to use the new funding to expand its offerings and continue building the technology platform for its accredited online school, the Crimson Global Academy.
“We want to continue to grow our role as the critical partner in a child’s education, from academic tutoring, to high school, extracurricular development, university candidacy building, to providing access to leading careers, informative research, and leadership opportunities throughout the different phases of their journey,” said co-founder Jamie Beaton in a statement provided to SmartCompany.
The new investment will also see Movac partner Mark Vivian and HEAL Partners’ Martin Dalgleish join the Crimson board of directors, with Alex Robertson from Tiger Management also appointed as a board observer.
Nexobot: $400,000
Warehouse robotics startup Nexobot has secured $400,000 in pre-Seed funding from Skalata and Antler to give smaller retailers access to cost effective robotic systems for order fulfilment.
As reported by Startup Daily, Nexobot aims to help smaller businesses compete against much bigger operators, like Amazon, that can deploy multimillion-dollar fulfilment systems.
The startup, which was founded by Dom Lindsay and Nicholas Hunt in 2023, uses 3D printing to create robots for ‘micro-fulfilment’ needs, which can be modified and scaled to meet a business’ requirements.
According to Hunt, most automated parcel sorting systems are expensive and take months to put in place. They can also require complex local networking and may only be available on long-term contracts.
“Nexobot is helping smaller, local warehouses increase their volume by 20-30%, while reducing costs of human labour, and inefficiencies created by human error,” he said.
According to investment notes from Skalata Ventures, Nexobot has recently been accepted into the Swinburne’s Elevate accelerator program, and plans to start expanding its focus into secondary markets.
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