{"id":45475,"date":"2023-10-20T15:43:49","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:43:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/australian-founders-raise-2-1-million-for-their-startup-proxy-as-it-officially-launches-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:43:49","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:43:49","slug":"australian-founders-raise-2-1-million-for-their-startup-proxy-as-it-officially-launches-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/australian-founders-raise-2-1-million-for-their-startup-proxy-as-it-officially-launches-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Australian founders raise $2.1 million for their startup Proxy as it officially launches – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/div>\n

Two Aussie entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley have raised $2.1 million ($US1.6 million) for their startup Proxy as it officially launches its first Internet of Things-focused product.<\/p>\n

Sydney co-founders Denis Mars and Simon Ratner co-founded Proxy in San Francisco and recently completed the renowned Y Combinator accelerator program.<\/p>\n

Proxy offers a platform aiming to integrate all the various standalone apps for internet-connected devices and eliminate the need for logging in to these devices individually.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s first offering is focused on office locks and reducing the need for swipe cards, with a planned expansion into the consumer and home markets.<\/p>\n

Experienced founders<\/h3>\n

The seed funding round was led by Australian VC firm Blackbird Ventures, which chipped in $US1 million, while Y Combinator also contributed funding.<\/p>\n

Blackbird Ventures co-founder Rick Baker says it was the experienced founders and their long-term vision that convinced the firm to back them.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt started with the co-founders \u2013 when they had an idea for a new business we caught up with them and were really excited about what they were doing,\u201d Baker tells StartupSmart<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a super cool team with a really interesting, really big picture mission. We think it could be a really valuable large business in the long term.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re hugely driven, very passionate founders that have really thought through the problem and immersed themselves in it. They\u2019re really just the kind of people that know how to build a business.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both of the Proxy co-founders are serial entrepreneurs with experience in Silicon Valley. Mars was the co-founder of Bitplay which was acquired by Jive Software in 2012, along with Modena, which was acquired in 2006.<\/p>\n

Ratner previously served as the CTO of Imporia after earlier selling his startup Omnisio to Google.<\/p>\n

Bringing together fragmented technology<\/h3>\n

Proxy\u2019s technology works through a Bluetooth signal emitted from a smartphone that can be picked up by IoT devices as a user approaches it, using the Proxy app to quickly identify them and then give them instant control.<\/p>\n

Baker points to the ease of Uber payments of the smart bands used at Disney Land in Orlanda to how seamless these connections can be.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re really on a mission to create these delightful experiences where humans interact with machines or other humans through machines,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are experiences where you don\u2019t need to take your phone out of your pocket, it just happens automatically.<\/p>\n

\u201cProxy\u2019s long-term mission is to create a platform to allow all businesses to build applications that integrate with the Internet of Things and allow people to create these beautiful experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the Internet of Things set to become a booming market, he says Proxy\u2019s offering could be the key that brings it all together.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Internet of Things at the moment is very fragmented,\u201d Baker says.<\/p>\n

\u201cDevices are supposed to help us and give us great experiences but we have to pull out our phone and there are still separate apps for everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says that Blackbird sets aside about 80% of its funds for SaaS, marketplace and IoT startups, with the rest going towards moonshots, and Proxy falls right in the centre.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to be a doing a bunch of investments that have really, really big ambition, and we\u2019re seeing more of these coming out of Australia,\u201d Baker says.<\/p>\n

Follow StartupSmart on<\/em> Facebook,<\/em> Twitter, LinkedIn and SoundCloud.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two Aussie entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley have raised $2.1 million ($US1.6 million) for their startup Proxy as it officially launches<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":58729,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45475"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}