Melbourne startup Fluency has raised US$6m (A$8.55m) in a Seed round led by US VC Accel, Atlassian’s first external investor.
The raise values the business at around $30m. The cash will help expand the engineering team and support international growth.
Other investors include DST Global Partners (which, along with Accel, was an early Facebook backer), Mixture of Experts, Carya Venture Partners, Archangel Ventures, and NextGen Ventures.
Fluency previously banked a $1.5m pre-Seed round in April last year.
Swinburne engineering graduates and self-taught developers Finnlay Morcombe and Oliver Farnill, both now 25, launched Fluency in 2023. They joined the Swinburne Innovation Studio Pre-Accelerator, winning the Best Pitch Award, then the People’s Choice Award in the subsequent accelerator, and we part of Startmate’s Summer ’25 cohort.
The work intelligence platform captures how work happens across an organisation, using AI to turn it into documentation, alongside outlining automation opportunities, and transformation insights.
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Morcombe said the platform replaces the work of management consultants who documented processes manually, cost more and took longer, producing things such as step-by-step guides with annotated screenshots, standard operating procedures and visual workflow maps in days.
No integration required
It doesn’t require integrations with existing systems and can capture activity across workplace applications, from Salesforce to Excel, without connecting to them.
The inspiration for Fluency came to Morcombe during an internship at a superannuation fund, where he had to manually document processes to move them from one team to another.
“Fluency was created after we saw a widening gap between AI ambition at the leadership level and what teams were actually able to execute with AI on the ground,” he said.
“Companies are under pressure to adopt AI quickly, but most don’t have a clear picture of how work actually happens. Without the operational baseline, it is very difficult to understand where to deploy AI and know it is delivering real returns.”
The two-year-old startup counts insurance provider AON, fashion group PVH Corp, and education publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt among its client base.
Accel partner Abhinav Chaturvedi said Fluency stood out because of its focus on operational fundamentals, not experimentation for its own sake.
“AI capability is no longer the limiting factor. The real challenge is understanding where to apply it,” he said.
