Breaking out of stealth mode (from left): Aether CEO Carsten Gruber, COO Ursula von Keisenberg, strategy and product chief Daniel Alexander-Head and head of customer Rosanna Dedecius.
Breaking out of stealth mode (from left): Aether CEO Carsten Gruber, COO Ursula von Keisenberg, strategy and product chief Daniel Alexander-Head and head of customer Rosanna Dedecius.
Carsten Gruber, until recently general manager of TikTok’s New Zealand arm, used Icehouse Ventures’ annual Showcase event to break cover with his new venture: a start-up called Aether that lets you use artificial intelligence to make marketing presentations.
Talking to the Herald ahead of the event, Gruber said Aether (pronounced“ether”) has just closed an over-subscribed $3.8 million seed round, led by Icehouse Ventures with support from Brand Fund 2 (a Previously Unavailable and Icehouse joint venture).
The start-up was born out of self-styled “venture studio” New+Improved.
It was also responsible for kicking off brand-tracking start-up Tracksuit (which recently raised $42m) and insights platform, Ideally (which recently scooped up $6m).
New+Improved co-founder Simon Pound (also a Brand Fund lead and Previously Unavailable managing partner) said his firm reached the concept for Aether following interviews with hundreds of marketing leaders and enterprise marketing businesses, where the redundant time on presentations and poor activation of institutional knowledge emerged as a repeat pattern.
In its first few months, Aether has signed 18 clients, including ASX-listed firms, as it hit an annual recurring revenue rate of $600,000 while still under the radar.
Early customers include Kiwibank and the Australian operation of the US-based multinational Edgewell Personal Care (whose brand stable includes Wilkinson Sword, Banana Boat, Playtex and Stayfree).
And it’s just signed a “seven-figure deal” with a global fast-moving consumer goods firm with 22,000 marketing staff.
Why would they not just, say, ask Copilot to create a PowerPoint, or take advantage of any of the various GenAI (generative artificial intelligence) bots that let you create presentations with natural language prompts?
Creating a presentation using Aether.
Gruber said the GenAIs are designed for a general audience of millions, or billions, while Aether has been honed from the ground up for marketing presentations and the likes of quarterly business reviews, monthly performance reports, campaign reports, agency briefs and knowledge management – tasks that traditionally drain resources and delay decision-making.
Among its party tricks, Aether doesn’t just create static decks. A presentation is “live” – automatically refreshing when underlying data synched to it is updated.
Gruber said it addresses widespread “organisational amnesia” where a big company spends large amounts on research only for it to be forgotten or underutilised.
Pound (who has also joined the board) said Aether is aimed at the top end of town. Many of its early customers have more than 5000 staff and large in-house marketing teams.
Aether is aimed at making it easier for staff (including non-marketing staff) to access source materials, then easily turn them into a presentation, he added.
New+Improved co-founder and Aether director Simon Pound says big companies can spend millions on marketing research, but sometimes lack the tools for all staff to easily access it and turn it into presentations. Photo / Jason Oxenham
“AI allows us to not only make faster, on-brand, well-formatted documents and presentations, but it also means the millions of dollars of research, strategy and proprietary data like sales, customer or market data to be brought to bear on every piece of work, in a way no human ever could,” Pound said.
“Aether generates insightful and presentation-ready storylines from large and complex files, saving our team hours on data synthesis and summation,” Dave Took, Edgewell’s Asia-Pacific head of consumer insights, said.
Gruber held senior roles with Google and Meta in Germany before setting up TikTok’s operations in the country. In 2023, he shifted to New Zealand to set up TikTok’s first office here. “My wife is a Kiwi,” he said.
Co-founder Ursula von Keisenberg, Aether’s Melbourne-based co-founder, previously served as ANZ managing director at Timely and emerging markets sales lead at Xero Asia.
The team also includes head-of-customer Rosanna Dedecius (until recently with Datacom) and Sydney-based product and strategy chief Daniel Alexander-Head, formerly a regional sales manager with US brand-building software firm Qualtrics.
The seed raise will be used to accelerate product development and expand the global team, currently spread across Australia and New Zealand.
Although he’s previously worked for Big Tech, Gruber said a start-up vibe is nothing new.
When he established TikTok’s beachhead in Germany, with 10 staff, he was one of eight starting the same day. And when he set up the social media giant’s New Zealand office, in Auckland, he had to do everything from scratch, from ordering tables and chairs to mapping the local chief marketing office landscape then making cold calls.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
