It took about three days. That is how long Andrew Sellen says it took to raise A$1.6 million for a startup that had barely begun. For anyone who has spent months chasing cheques, the number sounds like a typo.
The idea came over beers at the end of 2015. Sellen and his three co-founders, Paul Bennetts, Kaushik Sen and Dave Kuhn, all came out of financial services, and all had a similar itch. They were frustrated trying to launch fresh ideas inside large institutions. Sellen's particular complaint was about default super options: heavily weighted to Australian shares, particularly the big banks and miners. He called that risky.
The round was the first startup investment made through Mike Cannon-Brookes' Grok Ventures.
So they built Spaceship, a mobile-only super fund that put money into large technology companies and startups, with the biggest weighting in names like Apple. Members could see their holdings down to the stock level. An AI-driven app would track where their money went, and a single tap would merge scattered super accounts.
The backers were a small who's who of Australian tech. The round was the first startup investment made through Mike Cannon-Brookes' Grok Ventures. Also in were Simon Clausen, an early Salesforce investor, Aconex founder Leigh Jasper, Upguard's Mike Baukes and Alan Sharp-Paul, and Vinomofo's Andre Eikmeier. Cannon-Brookes said he planned to move his own super into the fund when it launched. That single line did more for credibility than a brochure.
But retirement money is not a social app. In 2018 the regulator fined the company over its super product statements, a reminder that a friendly interface does not exempt a fund from the rulebook that governs the old giants.
The ending came in September 2024, when eToro acquired it. The four who began over beers had built something a global platform wanted, in under a decade.
The lesson for future founders is in the seed round. It closed fast because the founders were credible insiders who named a specific villain, the default fund, and had angels who understood fintech. Speed in fundraising is rarely luck; it is usually the compound interest of a reputation and a sharp argument.