Tinder and Zip Pay billionaires back Brisbane teenagers’ $2.2m idea

He finished high school when he was 16 and now, two years later, he’s attracted the attention of two billionaires.

Two Brisbane teenagers have launched a business that has gained the backing of some of the world’s most famous billionaires.

Liam Millward, 18, and William Gao, 19, raised a whopping $2.2 million in pre-seed funding to take their idea to the next level.

They came up with ‘Instant’ in April last year as a way to stop online shoppers from abandoning their purchase because the checkout process was too complicated.

“For Instant we’re focused on simplifying the way shoppers shop online,” Mr Millward told news.com.au.

“We want [customers] to speed through checkout, not have to keep logging in, whether that’s directly from Facebook or the homepage of the e-commerce store, you should be able to reach that item mid-tap. The idea is to simplify.”

The funding round attracted billionaire Zip co-founder Larry Diamond as well as US entrepreneur Justin Mateen, who created dating app Tinder.

Mr Millward only had his 18th birthday a month before the crowd-funding began and estimates he works in excess of 70 hours every week.

Liam Millward founded the company when he was just 18.

Mr Millward is no stranger to starting his own business.

When he was 15, he travelled around Australia with his family and started a travel blog with 50,000 readers.

A year later, at age 16, the teenage prodigy graduated high school and began university immediately afterwards.

Now 18, he has three diplomas under his belt related to business marketing.

It was during one of his university classes that Mr Millward stumbled across the idea that would later become Instant.

An example of Instant.

“One of my units was looking at e-commerce during Covid-19 so I created my own Shopify account,” Mr Millward recalled.

He noticed that most shoppers would visit his site, add a few things into their cart, then give up because of the time-consuming checkout process.

The young man wanted to “solve this problem”, acknowledging that it was “annoying” to have to keep inputting credit card details. Soon Instant was born.

William Gao co-founded the company.

The then-17-year-old knew he needed a software engineer to turn his idea into something tangible.

He started messaging people on LinkedIn and this was how he met Sydney-based William Gao.

By this point, Mr Gao had already started his own pet accessory business as a side hustle and had interned at an ASX-listed tech company.

The two soon hit it off and became equal co-founders in the company.

Instant has now launched in 15 stores, with one of them based in New Zealand and the rest in Australia.

The company currently has five employees, including its two founders.

Much like Afterpay or Zip, the company’s business model relies on taking a small commission for every purchase made through it.