Lakeba Launches Scale-Up Fund to Eliminate Growing Pains for Startups

Lakeba’s new fund will help startups cross the scale chasm with its diverse investment opportunities

The Scale-Up Fund is looking for businesses that have experienced fast growth but require significant investment in capital or resources. Lakeba’s Scale-Up Fund provides diversity in its investment, including capital, operational expertise, legal and risk guidance, marketing support, financial management, or even mentoring to enable the business to reach its full potential.

Giuseppe Porcelli, Group CEO at Lakeba, believes the fund will help many more Australian entrepreneurs follow in the footsteps of Australia’s most prominent technology exports. Helping their businesses to scale in terms of technology, geography or personnel.

“When building a business, it’s common to experience growing pains, especially if you have built a great product generating real demand. Rather than have your business splitting at the seams, Lakeba can help provide the perfect fit. Tailoring our investment to suit your specific needs. Offering the support, guidance and resources to help scale-ups reach their full potential,” says Porcelli.

“That’s why our investment is more than a cheque but a meaningful partnership to help entrepreneurs fast-track success. Having built 17 digital businesses since 2013, we know our track-record, skills and capital can help support Australian businesses ready to take on the world. We want to give them the tools they need to become Australia’s next big export.”

Lakeba has already made two investments in promising scale-ups, Australia based appreci and US based LÜM. Since investing capital, capabilities and resources, the two businesses have seen immediate success.

For appreci, Lakeba supported the business in its distribution by leveraging its partnership with Microsoft to integrate appreci with Microsoft Teams.

“We were doing well. Now we’re going gangbusters since Lakeba invested in us by growing our distribution and enhancing the UX of our app,” says Craig Mai, CEO and founder of appreci.

For LÜM, Lakeba has provided capital and development capabilities to scale the social media and music streaming platform. With Lakeba’s development team helping LÜM to more than double its addressable market.

“With Lakeba, we’re quickly scaling our platform across operating systems and countries,” says Max Fergus, CEO and founder of LÜM.

Lakeba has significant experience in helping businesses scale fast, having built many successful companies itself. One being BRICKLET, which it launched in 2019. Lakeba has supported BRICKLET in selling over $15M bricklets and provides fragmented property investments across several property types.

“Lakeba turbo-charged our app. The coding and technical know-how we gained from Lakeba’s investment reduced our dev-cycle by several months,” says Darren Younger, co-founder at BRICKLET.

Recently, BRICKLET completed its Series A capital raise at a value of $28 million.

“In just over a year, we managed to help BRICKLET through conception, creation and commercialisation. Our investment has now been joined by illustrious company, including Mirvac, Stockland and REA Group, as we look to grow the business.”

Since its formation in 2013, Lakeba has built 17 businesses, which have raised over $23M independently. Lakeba also shepherded three of these businesses to successful exits totalling more than $20M. It currently has 12 active ventures in its portfolio, achieving a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 84% between 2016-2019.

For more information on Lakeba’s Scale-Up Fund, visit www.lakeba.com.

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About Lakeba

Lakeba builds businesses that are optimised for high returns from low investment, at low risk when compared with the start-up sector. It utilises proprietary artificial intelligence (AI), decades of business and technology experience, and scalable shared services, to support each phase of business building. So far it has ‘conceived, created and commercialised’ 15 ventures, of which three have already been spun-out.

The unique Lakeba AI ‘neural network’ ‘conceives’ opportunities by continually interrogating the internet to establish patterns which suggest a business ‘need’ that could be solved digitally. Its entrepreneurs then double check this analysis and determine the viability of the business idea and its commercial potential.

To ‘create’ a venture, Lakeba works with partners, industry, and the wider innovations ecosystem to create digital technologies that eliminate the frictions identified by the neural network. A team of technologists, designers, and entrepreneurs build out the value proposition and establish the business. Lakeba invests its time, capabilities, capital and resources to craft ideas into reality.

‘Commercialise’ is the final stage of the Lakeba process. Once the digital proof of concept delivers on its promise, it is enhanced with radical intelligence. Working with partners, investors and the customers, Lakeba’s team refines and optimises the operations and distribution to rapidly commercialise the venture. This ensures the business continuously delivers value to customers as it scales and diversifies across industries and the globe.

Lakeba Group was founded by Giuseppe Porcelli, Entrepreneur and Visionary of Future Technology.