It’s been a hectic 12 months for AI-based workflow automation platform Relevance AI, winner of Startup of the Year at the Startup Daily Best in Tech Awards 2025.
The award, sponsored by Vanta, recognises an all-round outstanding early-stage startup that has demonstrated strong growth and leadership in creating a new way of doing business and market category, with less than 100 employees.
It was the second award on the night for Relevance AI, which also took out the AI Gamechanger award, sponsored by AWS Startups.
That award recognises how artificial intelligence is transforming workflows, business operations, data analytics and the way we interact, with the winner demonstrating a clear benefit across a broad spectrum in helping transform the world through the application of AI.
Sydney-based Relevance AI raised A$37 million in a Series B in May. The company now employs more than 80 people across its San Francisco and Sydney offices and saw 40,000 agents created on its platform in a month.
The agentic AI platform enables anyone to build an AI workforce. It counts Qualified, Activision, and SafetyCulture among its customers.
Relevance AI has a clear vision and mission – that an AI workforce is key to the next doubling of human prosperity and its platform enables real people, not just developers, to build, manage, and scale AI agents that handle the repetitive, low-value work holding teams back.
Relevance AI began life as an unstructured data analytics platform for vectors nearly six years ago, before evolving into helping companies build custom AI agents – think chatbots– for tasks such as answering customer inquiries, outbound sales, or market research.
The AI startup also launched two features: ‘Workforce,’ a visual multi-agent system builder, and ‘Invent,’ a text-to-agent generator.
Building a team
At the Best in Tech awards in Sydney, cofounder Daniel Palmer celebrated the team effort that’s gone into the company’s success by inviting everyone in the Relevance team to join him on stage.
“An award for a startup feels a little strange to me in that you’re never finished,” he said.
Relevance AI cofounders Daniel Vassilev, Daniel Palmer and Jacky Koh
“But I think what it means is a celebration of the awesome hard work that our team puts in every single day. I think that’s worth celebrating. I think that’s something that I would present an award to any day of the week.
“And so I’m really glad that that’s been recognised because working with the team of people I do, they’re just the most hard-working, talented people I’ve ever met in my life and I’m really happy to have a physical monument to that now.”
Palmer said that since founding Relevance, he’s been struck by how rapidly things change in AI.
“Seriously, it’s a crazy industry to be in because you have to wake up every day and be like, OK, has someone released something that fundamentally changes everything?” he said.
“I’m sure that’s going to happen 100 times over the next year. What we’ve been really good at is being one step ahead and really working hard to stay one step ahead. We’ll continue to do that.”
Palmer gave a hint at what’s in the pipeline – a new chat application that takes on some of the biggest global players in that space.
“This is something we’ve never done before. We’ve always been an autopilot. Agents working in the background. Now we’re taking on your ChatGPT, we’re going to take on your Manus and Genspark, some fantastic companies and give you the ability to use any LLM chat to it on your phone,” he said.
“Bring in the agents that you build on our platform, bring in some really cool built-in agents that can build slides and websites that we’re going to build for you.”
So what advice does the cofounder of Startup of the Year have for other founders on building a pathway to success?
“I think you can never guarantee that you’re going to wake up every day and make every decision correct,” Palmer said.
“So if you create enough traps around you that forces you to steer your decision-making. That’s something that I think about a lot and we do it in our team.
“An example of that is we will ban features in some of the products we’re building because we know that if we don’t have those features to rely on, we have to make the other parts of the product good enough to compensate for them.
“And that’s how we make the real parts of the product that matter really.”
This article is brought to you by Startup Daily, with the support of Vanta.
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