Safewill start-up raises $17m; ANZ puts $6m behind Dataco; Crowdcube’s Darren Weslake joins Birchal

A Sydney start-up that can write wills in 15 minutes for a fraction of the cost of the going market rate has picked up $17m to grow its business.

Safewill founder and CEO Adam Lubowsky, principal solicitor Isabelle Marcarian and chief operating officer Henry Harding.

A Sydney start-up that can create a will in less than 15 minutes for 80 per cent less than traditional methods has raised $17m to grow the business.

Safewill, which has written 150,000 Australian wills since its founding in 2019, claims more than half of the population is yet to write a will.

It is going after that market and claims to have grown its membership base 200 per cent year-on-year since 2019. It also partners with charities to funnel estates into their bequest programs, with more than $1bn raised in future gifts to the likes of the Cancer Council, RSPCA and Guide Dogs.

Its latest capital raise, a $17m series B round, was led by Reinventure and King River Capital, with Flying Fox Ventures, Carthona Capital, former Perpetual chief executive Geoff Lloyd, Zip co-founder Larry Diamond and Betashares founders Alex Vynokur and Ilan Israelstam also participating.

Chief executive Adam Lubofsky said Australia’s current wills and estates process was “outdated and doesn’t work for modern families”.

“The traditional approach to estate planning in Australia is expensive, highly manual and often unsuitable for the lives of modern families,” he said

“We’re moving beyond estate planning towards estate administration and planning for what the future of that space will look like.

“It’s such a complex, manual and opaque process around such a challenging time for families.”

Meanwhile, an Australian start-up that acts as an intermediary between companies and allows them to share data without compromising their customers has raised $6m.

DataCo chief executive Rami Mukhtar said the business “enables organisations to essentially connect their data with other partner organisations in a privacy-preserving way.”

After joining ANZ’s 1835i venture studio the start-up has managed to nab $6m in a seed raise as well as with ANZ which will launch a data-sharing service through the DataCo platform.

While Mr Mukhtar said while the industry was still in its infancy, new privacy laws were driving up demand for services that could exchange data between companies. “I am aiming to start really canvassing larger markets next year,” he said.

“The US is a key focus. Privacy regulations are only tightening in that jurisdiction and what organisations have traditionally done isn’t really viable. We believe the market is ripe for us to enter.”

Elsewhere, equity crowd-funding platform Birchal has gone to the UK and nabbed the man behind the industry’s founding to build out its platform.

Birchal has appointed Darren Westlake, who founded the world’s first equity crowd-funding platform as a part-time strategic adviser.

Birchal chief executive Matt Vitale said he was excited to bring Mr Westlake on board and grow the industry to the same levels as the UK where there was more cross collaboration between venture capital funds, equity crowd-funding and other investors.

Mr Vitale said that if equity crowd-funding was adopted in Australia as widely as it has been in the UK, “that infers an annual funding volume of between $500m to $700m”.