A nine-month wait to finalise their pre-Seed round has paid off for product market testing startup Heatseeker, nearly doubling its size to US$1.5 (A$2.3m).
The raise was led by San Francisco-based Capital F, with support from Dom Pym’s family office, Euphemia, Even Capital and East End Ventures.
In September last year, the Sydney via Gold Coast startup, founded in 2023, had A$1.3 million in commitments for its pre-Seed, leveraging a $200,000 Female Founders Co-Investment grant from Advance Queensland. Cofounders Kate O’Keeffe and Fiona Triaca were looking, at the time, to close off the round within weeks.
Their patience and perseverance has been rewarded, with the duo adding former Atlassian head of product Rutger Coolen to the founding team as they focus their efforts on the US market.
The AI platform helps businesses validate their product roadmap, refine value propositions, and prioritise buying drivers through strategic A/B testing, redefining how brands uncover authentic user behaviour, to save companies from bad decisions by uncovering actual consumer intent. It gives product and marketing managers, and others more accurate and timely market insights.
Heatseeker now has a dozen enterprise clients across the US, Europe and Australia, including leading banks and health insurers, using it across their entire product development and go-to-market lifecycle.
O’Keeffe, the CEO, said Heatseeker is now following the successful path laid down several successful Australian startups by establishing a dual-continent model with product development here and go-to-market operations based out of the US.
“Today companies are shooting in the dark, guessing at what their customers want,” she said.
“We’re ending the era where companies make multi-million dollar decisions based on what focus group participants claim they want. Our platform delivers what they truly need – authentic buying behaviour, captured in real time, at scale.”
Capital F cofounder Margaret Coblentz said it’s an issue so many in business face.
“We’ve seen this problem firsthand in our operating careers – companies launching strategies based on shaky data that doesn’t reflect real-world behaviour,” she said.
“Heatseeker’s solution was immediately compelling, but it was the exceptional founding team with the right experience to execute rapidly that drove our conviction.”
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