Today we get to share some news we've been sitting on for a little while. SupaHuman has closed a $2.6 million Series A, led by Movac, with Ecliptic VC, K1W1, Snowball and Serge van Dam coming in alongside them.
There's a press release doing the rounds, and it says all the right things. But the people who've got us here deserve more than a few paragraphs of formal copy, so we wanted to write this one ourselves. It's for our customers, for our team, and for anyone who's been keeping an eye on what we're up to.
How we got here
SupaHuman has always been about applied AI: taking what the technology can do and making it work on real problems, inside real organisations. Through AI Studio, we've worked alongside customers in a lot of different industries, building AI that fits the way they actually operate.
That work taught us something. Every so often, a problem we solve for one customer turns out not to be theirs alone. It's a problem the whole sector has, and solving it one engagement at a time isn't enough. When that happens, we've made a choice to commit to it properly, and build a product that solves it not just for the customer in front of us, but for everyone facing the same thing.
AI Studio is where those problems show up first, and it remains at the heart of what we do. The products come from what we learn there.
Vocational education was the first
The clearest example so far is vocational education. Working with training providers, we kept coming back to one idea. Judging whether someone is competent is human work. Almost everything else is not.
Yet trainers and compliance teams spend months designing, mapping and validating programmes before a single learner sees the benefit. That's what VETos and Nova are for. VETos, the AI Operating System for Vocational Education, designs assessments and learning resources mapped to a provider's scope, and validates them before an auditor does. Nova delivers learning that students actually practise, rather than learning they sit through.
The timing matters too. AI is starting to reshape work right across the economy, and when the work changes, people need new skills to keep up. Vocational education is where they turn to get them. We think we're at the start of the great reskilling, and the providers carrying it deserve tools that let them move as quickly as the world around them.
It won't be the last sector where we do this. The same pattern that led us here, seeing a problem in one place and recognising it everywhere, is how we'll decide what we build next.
To our customers
Thank you. Whether you've worked with us through AI Studio or through our products, you've shaped what SupaHuman has become, often by telling us plainly what wasn't working and sticking with us while we fixed it. In New Zealand, organisations like Connexis, Competenz, ServiceIQ and Mast Academy helped shape VETos and Nova. Since we soft-launched in Australia at VETQI Melbourne in March, providers including Canberra Institute of Technology, Hader Institute, Ashley Services Group, academyEX and Northern College of the Arts and Technology have come on board, with more joining them every month.
You trusted a young company with work that matters a lot to you. We don't take that lightly. Day to day, nothing changes about how you work with us. You should just see things improve more quickly.
To our team
You built this. Every client engagement, every late fix, every onboarding call, every time someone went the extra mile for a customer on a tight deadline. The Studio work and the product work are two halves of the same thing, and neither exists without the other. Investors backed the plan, but they backed it because of what you've already delivered. We're grateful, and more than a little proud of what this group has done.
To the wider market
We're staying focused. This isn't money to chase every shiny idea. It's to deepen what we do in New Zealand and to take it properly into Australia, with NZTE supporting us on that expansion. We'll keep solving hard problems for our customers, and where those problems turn out to belong to a whole sector, we'll keep committing to them.
If you've got a problem you think AI should be able to solve, and nobody's solved it yet, we'd be glad to have a chat.
Welcoming our investors
Movac have backed Crimson Education and Kindo, so they know what it takes to build a company like ours out of New Zealand. David Beard joins our board as Movac's director, and we're looking forward to working more closely with him. We're also really pleased to have Ecliptic VC, K1W1, Snowball and Serge van Dam alongside us.
What happens next
Mostly more of the same, done faster and further afield. We'll share more as it happens. In the meantime, thank you to everyone who's come along with us so far.
Dave, Blair and Zane
Co-founders, SupaHuman