Former PM Malcolm Turnbull, Canva founders back AI start-up Fingerprint for Success

A Sydney start-up building an AI product it says will revolutionise company and team performance coaching secures $5m from several major investors.

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has joined Canva co-founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, plus Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen and local venture capital firm Investible in backing Sydney-based AI start-up Fingerprint for Success to the tune of $9m.

The start-up, led by founder and chief executive Michelle Duval, has built an AI coach – Marlee – which Ms Duval describes as ‘world-first technology pioneering the democratisation of coaching’.

F4S posted 300 per cent year-on-year user growth from the US, UK and India in the past 12 months and has delivered more than 900,000 minutes of AI coaching, Ms Duval said.

The company has now raised $9m from investors including Investible, which led the most recent round, and venture firms Five V Capital and Salesforce Ventures. It did not disclose its valuation.

“I have an unusual story, I was one of the first early professional coaches. And when I would say I’m a coach, people would say ’what sports team do you coach’, and since then we’ve developed a field of professional coaching and I went on to write several books in the field,” Ms Duval said in an interview.

“We developed coaching psychology models that have been validated now for over 20 years that we’ve actually trained our AI coach with.

“We had a vision that we wanted to basically make human development available to everybody, and after all those years of coaching the world’s best athletes, the world’s best actors and producers, it was awesome to do that but so many people can’t access that.”

The capital will be used to make F4S’ coaching accessible via third-party integrations to tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Slack, she said.

Marlee is a “freemium” tool, meaning users can make a free account and queue up coaching sessions, and then chat back and forth with an AI chatbot which is similar to messaging over WhatsApp or SMS.

Canva co-founders Cameron Adams, Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins. Picture: Supplied

Canva was one of the company’s first customers, and thousands of its employees now have access to the F4S coaching software.

“We’re really excited to welcome investors aligned to our vision to join us in the next stage of growth. We’re looking forward to strengthening our market footprint across the US, the UK and Asia Pacific, and to ship even more value to our users and teams,” Ms Duval said.

“Coach Marlee is improving personal, team and company performance. We’re building self confidence, self esteem, and helping teams work better together. Ultimately, we’re helping people find meaning and fulfilment at work.”

Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen, also an early Canva investor, said in an interview that he was introduced to F4S by Canva’s co-founders.

“I got introduced to Michelle by Mel and Cliff at Canva, and to be honest, it’s one of the strongest introductions I’ve had to a start-up and I would have cut a cheque just based on the introduction,” he said. “It’s an incredible start-up and Michelle is world-class coach. It was an exciting pitch, we met during the lockdown, but she has built something that’s just so impressive and you can see the growth already.”

F4S is building on the rampant popularity of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, whose creator OpenAI recently received a $US10bn investment from tech giant Microsoft.

“Marlee is coaching to more than 1000 different types of goals from improving communication, becoming a better leader, to making a difference or becoming a high performing team. In the last 18 months, more than 100,000 personalised goals have been shared with Marlee across all areas of work and life,” Ms Duval said.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

“There has been a focus until now for companies to prioritise hard, technical skills deemed necessary for performance. Though, it’s actually the ‘soft’ or what we like to call human skills that have proven time and time again to make or break teams and are the most crucial in building goal-oriented, efficient and purpose-driven teams.

“There’s a driving need to rapidly grow resources and solutions to solve the complex problems Gen Alpha, GenZs and Millennials inherit. F4S’s scalable technology is an always ready, real-time solution to optimise the otherwise untapped potential within our future problem solvers, helping both individuals and teams to invent and navigate brighter futures.”