Two of Australia's biggest banks, rivals in almost every other way, wrote a cheque to the same small startup. That oddity is the clearest fact in Basiq's story, and it says a lot about what the company was selling.
Basiq was founded in 2016 by Damir Cuca, who still leads it as chief executive. Publicly available accounts say little about his early life, schooling or the years before the company. What they do show is a founder who spotted a plumbing problem. Australia was heading toward open banking, a regime in which customers could allow other companies to see their bank data. Someone had to build the connections. Basiq set out to be that someone, described at the time as the country's first open banking API platform.
The customers were banks, lenders and fintechs, none of whom had to be persuaded that data access was a problem.
The early money came from the very institutions that stood to be disrupted. In June 2017, NAB Ventures and Westpac's Reinventure put money into a seed round whose size was never disclosed. By October 2019 a Series A brought those two back, alongside Salesforce Ventures, one of the first investments from Salesforce's new Australia Trailblazer Fund. Visa also made an undisclosed investment.
The customers were banks, lenders and fintechs, none of whom had to be persuaded that data access was a problem. What a startup in that position needs is credibility and patience, since regulatory timelines move slowly and revenue depends on them. Neither the sums raised nor the revenue were ever made public, so it is not possible to say how long the wait took.
The ending is still unwritten.
What remains is a clear shape. A founder chose infrastructure over an app, picked the least glamorous layer of a coming regulatory change, and got incumbents to fund it. Backing from NAB, Westpac, Salesforce and Visa meant potential customers were also investors.
For first-time founders, the point is simple. If your product depends on a rule change, find the people the change affects most and bring them in early. Sometimes your first investors are also your first customers.