Zeller asked investors for A$6.3m before it had anything to show them. No product, no customers, no launch date. There was a plan, and two people who had done something similar once before.
Those two were Ben Pfisterer and Dominic Yap, who had worked together at Square. In 2014 Pfisterer had launched Square in Australia and ran it as country manager until the end of 2019. Yap joined him very early, in strategy and growth, and stayed until 2020. Between them, they had watched thousands of small merchants struggle with the same thing: the banks.
They assembled a technical team, splitting the heavy engineering between two CTOs, David Conn and Alfred Wong.
What the public rarely heard is how little they could offer investors beyond their reputation. Square Peg Capital led the seed, and the firm's co-founder Paul Bassat joined the board. Addition, the fund started by Lee Fixel, put money in before launch too. It was a bet on two operators, not a deck.
They assembled a technical team, splitting the heavy engineering between two CTOs, David Conn and Alfred Wong. The target was ambitious. Zeller wanted to replace the merchant account, the terminal, the business transaction account and the card with one product, built for small businesses that felt ignored by the big four banks.
The product went public on 4 May 2021 from Melbourne. Growth was quick enough that Spark Capital led a round valuing it at about A$400m. Then, in March 2022, Headline and Hostplus led a A$100m Series B that aggregators price at above A$1bn after the money went in, making it one of Australia's fastest unicorns.
The price of speed is exposure. Taking on four entrenched banks means incumbents can cut fees overnight, and a business account carries trust that a startup must earn one merchant at a time. Pfisterer has talked about that fight as taking on the big four.
Public detail on the founders' childhoods is scarce, and the story rests on a simpler human fact. They built Zeller by going back to work they already knew in their bones, and asking investors to fund their judgement before a single customer existed.
For founders, the takeaway is sharp: experience that was once someone else's job can become your seed round.