A Queensland fintech building the financial layer underneath ad spend has raised $2.41 million in pre-Seed funding.
The round for Flyweel was led by Ten13, with support from Antler, QIC, and several fintech leaders including Mollie CEO and former Klarna CTO Koen Köppen, Zip cofounder Larry Diamond, and Stake cofounder Matt Leibowitz, as well as a US customer and other strategic angels.
The funds Flyweel’s financial products, including Performance Capital, an embedded lending product that funds ad spend upfront, repaying it repaid as revenue lands;0, spend cards and bill pay give businesses real-time control over where money flows, with yield on idle cash and ad budgets to come. The financial products launch in coming months will be going direct to the United States first, where Flyweel has seen the strongest adoption to date.
Flyweel was founded in 2025 by Reuben Scheckter and Matteo Calo, who met during Antler’s residency program last year. It connects ad platforms, CRM and accounting in real time, to give a business a measurable investment, and has already managed more than $110 million in ad spend in nearly 1000 businesses. It allows businesses to finance the gap between paying for ads and collecting revenue, then manage that spend with wallets, cards and bill pay.
Scheckter built a lead generation business to a successful exit, and managed more than $40 million in ad spend before building Flyweel to solve a problem he lived firsthand.
Calo led payments engineering at Adyen and Mollie, then at Semrush, where he ran teams processing more than US$300 million annually
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Scheckter, Flyweel’s CEO, said the goal is to treat advertising like a capital investment, rather than an expense line. That matters more as AI speeds up how fast businesses spend, and as new ad platforms go live. ChatGPT now runs ads and is already piloting them in Australia, giving businesses more ways than ever to put money to work before they see a return.
“With AI, companies are scaling ad budgets in-house and moving away from agencies and lead generators,” he said.
“But the old problems remain. They struggle to see what their spend returns, and the cash gap forces them to quietly throttle the campaigns that work. We give them the clarity to see it, the control to manage it, and the capital to scale it on their own terms, so they can treat ad spend like the investment it is, not a cost they hope pays off.”
Ten13 cofounder Stew Glynn said Flyweel is doing for ad spend what Stripe did for online payments, as the financial rail sitting beneath a fast-moving AI advertising ecosystem.
“Reuben has lived the problem on the operator side, and Matteo has built the financial infrastructure at Adyen and Mollie,” he said.
“As AI accelerates how fast businesses commit money to ads, the financial layer underneath becomes the most valuable real estate in the stack, and Flyweel is building it.”
Antler partner Mike Abbott, Flyweel’s first investor said ad spend is often the largest single working capital commitment growth businesses make.
“Flyweel is reframing it as a financeable, measurable investment – and doing it at the moment when AI is making that spend move faster than cash can follow,” he said.
“We backed Reuben and Matteo because they have the founders’ instincts and the infrastructure expertise to own the category”
