“To apply oneself to great inventions, starting from the smallest beginnings, is no task for ordinary minds”
- Galileo Galilei

At Galileo Ventures we understand “different”. We revere intellectual rigour to find answers and we get hustle. The RelevanceAI journey – who recently announced their A$37m Series B – is a great illustration of how we see our role as Australia’s leading early stage investor in supporting the companies creating the future.

We recently wrote about Australia’s current sliding doors moment in the roles we can play in the future of AI, but it didn’t start there – Galileo Partner James Alexander wrote about the future of AI software being agents in 2023 which was also discussed on our podcast.

To walk down history lane a little, we first invested in what is now Relevance AI in 2020. Daniel Vassilev, Jacky Koh and Daniel Palmer were building “VectorAI”, which was (at the time) a new way of encoding data in vectors, powering recommendation engines, insights and relationship mapping in ways that wasn’t possible before. 

We invest early in exceptional emerging founders

We love emerging founders who see the world differently, who think about how things can be. Where they are intrinsically led to see the world not as it is or should be. Rather as it could be, can be.

The best founders spend their time turning things around looking for the way of ease and customer satisfaction. Back when we first invested in late 2020, we loved the way that the team believed that they were going to change the way unstructured data is stored, retrieved and used. 

But of course that’s not what RelevanceAI is today – from the seeds of VectorAI, the team listened to customers, rapidly iterated and realised that there was a much bigger shift underway – the introduction of AI agents to what will become the “AI workforce”. 

You can see the early seeds of this from their video from our Showcase in July 2021 – watching Daniel speak about what RelevanceAI was going to become.

We believe in technical founders' power to create new markets

We’d known Dan and Jacky from Galileo GP James Alexanders' time at INCUBATE, a university accelerator, when these two young founders built a consumer app with nearly 1 million DAUs “just for fun”. It was clear that they could ship product, iterate and deliver.

Galileo founders are technical; they are deep domain experts, creators and makers/builders. They are deeply technical thinkers in their space be it robotics, gaming, fashion or developer tools. They use their technical ability to dive deep into a space, they look for the inefficiencies and how to make things better for humankind. 

The common trait across all of our founders is intellectual rigour - they move forward, constantly challenging their own thinking around a problem and use their technical know-how to extrapolate out possible solutions that they meticulously check and recheck. While their founder conviction is strong they are never ones to not seek clarity. Relevance’s pivot is a perfect example, as the team shifted their knowledge from building a vector database solution to an agent building platform.

We believe that the best founders intrinsically push themselves to question, seek, test and repeat. Short fast feedback cycles, staying close to the “customer lens” is the best way to build a world leading product like RelevanceAI.

Some of our best founder chats at Galileo have happened on our podcast, where we get to take a peak inside and really seek the great thinking our founders share around their problem space. You can see Dan from Relevance talking briefly about their vision for AI agents only 12 months ago in this interview and why they see it as a huge market.

“Galileo supported us not from Day 1, but from what we fondly call Day -100. They backed our earliest experiments, stood by us through pivots and challenges, and provided the foundation that enabled us to pursue our vision of building the definitive AI workforce platform”
Daniel Palmer, Co-Founder of Relevance AI

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Becoming a global leader in AI Agents

James notes, "This is only the start and there still many more miles to go – supporting the founders to win and compete on a global stage is what we’re now focussed on and we hope that Relevance AI continued success will become an inspiration for the next generation of AI-native founders (that we want to back!)."

After the initial pre-seed raise and as the product pivot started to see more and more traction, RelevanceAI knew it was time to double down and then raised a Seed led by US fund Insight Partners (US) in 2021 (about 8 months after the pre-seed), and then a Series A about 18 months later led by King River Capital (AU) and Peak XV (ex Sequoia India & SEA). Growth just kept coming as the team started to define this new market of enteprrise AI agents.

Fast forward a bit over 12 months and RelevanceAI has just closed a massive Series B led by Bessemer Partners (US) to double down again on the strategy to become the leading enterprise software platform for the AI workforce, having secured customers like SafetyCulture, Airwallex and Mirvac locally as well as huge international brands like Microsoft and Unilever.

‍“As we announce our US$24M Series B, it's impossible not to reflect on the partners who made Relevance AI possible in the first place. Galileo wasn't just an early investor – they were there before Relevance was Relevance. They saw potential not just in our vision, but in us as founders. In fact, Galileo was the catalyst that brought the three of us – Daniel Vassilev, Jacky Koh, and Daniel Palmer – together in the first place.”

Why we back technical founders with conviction

As seen with RelevanceAI, we invest early in technical founders with conviction, around a problem space that they have “earned insight” – they’ve worked hard and put the reps in to learn everything there is to learn about a domain. 

We look at founders that have the drive to build the world as they think it should be, and then we exist to support them.

Early stage founders need other great early stage founders to commiserate with, and they need access to resources like our global reach to San Francisco and active, high quality support active support. We know that providing founders with the above there is nothing they can not achieve.

For RelevanceAI this is only the start of the agentic revolution, we have no doubt that we will continue to be in awe of their stand out journey.