Tobi Pearce taps investors for latest venture following Sweat exit

Adelaide entrepreneur Tobi Pearce says Australia is well placed to ride out the global tech wreck as he taps investors for his latest start-up venture.

Tobi Pearce says EzLicence is expanding into Britain. Picture: Emma Brasier

Adelaide entrepreneur Tobi Pearce is tapping investors for his latest start-up venture ahead of an overseas expansion later this year.

Mr Pearce took the helm of online driving instructor marketplace EzLicence earlier this year, a year after his departure from digital fitness platform Sweat, which was acquired by US fitness giant iFIT in a $US150m deal in 2021.

EzLicence, which launched five years ago, allows learner drivers to find, compare and book verified driving instructors online, offering the service in major cities and towns across Australia.

Mr Pearce, who is a co-founder of the company, said the industry was “ripe for opportunity”, both in Australia and overseas.

“The EzLicence business had been running in the background for a couple of years … and frankly, it’s pretty exciting – it’s having some really awesome success,” he said. “I was really uniquely placed to help out in the sense that there were a few skill sets that we needed. We’re launching over in the UK later this year and I’ve launched and managed businesses in lots of different countries around the world, so I thought I would step in to help out.”

Mr Pearce’s Pearce & Co Investments is EzLicence’s largest single shareholder.

Other backers include co-founders Andrew Rawlinson and Simon Strode, Adelaide businessman Rob Chapman’s Chapman Capital Partners and Oodie founder Davie Fogarty.

David Rohrsheim, who manages the $50m South Australian Venture Capital Fund, became a director last September.

Mr Pearce said the company would soon close a SAFE (simple agreement for future equity) fundraising round, aimed at gaining “a few million dollars” for the company’s British expansion, ahead of forays into other overseas markets later down the track.

SAFEs, which are commonly used in the US, offer investors the right to purchase equity in the future at a discounted price. They have proven a popular alternative for start-ups looking to raise capital during the technology correction that slowed the flow of capital from venture capital firms and other early stage investors.

Mr Pearce said he was confident Australia would ride out the so-called ‘‘tech wreck’’, which has resulted in mass layoffs across the sector as investors batten down the hatches amid the post-pandemic economic volatility.

“Although there’s some difficulties and challenges at the moment, I think that’s just part of the cycle,” he said. “If we reflect on where we’ve come, both as a state and as a country, even as near as 10 or 15 years ago, it’s kind of night and day.

“So yes, I believe there’s some challenges now from a cultural perspective, and from a capital perspective, but I think we’ve made such massive progress, and I think one great example of that is the amount of awesome capability that we’ve built in Australia.”

Mr Pearce and former partner Kayla Itsines grew Sweat into one of the world’s largest digital fitness platforms, with a global following of more than 55 million women across its social media platforms.

Much of the company’s success was due to its ability to use social media and digital marketing to create a community of followers around the world, and particularly in the US, where Mr Pearce spent much of his time growing the brand. He said he was now looking to apply many of the lessons learnt overseas back home, both in the growth of EzLicence and in his role as an adviser and mentor to other founders.

“I was really lucky to be connected with a whole bunch of quite successful American founders and I kind of did the reverse of a lot of what happens in Australia, where people build a business and then they go away … I went to America, I learned a whole bunch stuff, and then came back and tried to share some of that here.

“A good example would be the way that they do digital marketing and performance marketing, like media buying and advertising.

“A huge amount of the success that we had at Sweat was off the back of the fact we actually did that quite well … I spent a lot of time learning from very big gaming and e-commerce companies in America, and the person who ran our performance marketing was based in San Francisco.

“So we deliberately tried to bring a lot of that knowledge back into Australia to elevate the capability of our teams.”

Since its launch in 2018, EzLicence has evolved into a specialist marketplace processing more than 25,000 hours of bookings each month for more than 900 verified instructors.

Mr Pearce said the company was born out of an idea to sell online video content to parents helping their children learn to drive.

“That idea didn’t work at all – I don’t think we ever even sold one unit of the content,” he said.

“But we got tens of thousands of learners (drivers) to the website for a very cheap amount, using pretty sophisticated digital marketing tactics.

“It was quite clear to me that, one, the initial business idea of content is just not going to work in that industry, but two, that the industry is absolutely ripe for opportunity.

“… And so, I kind of came up with this idea that we might try to build a marketplace or a platform business model in that industry and have a go at that.”