Melbourne startup Fluency has raised US$6 million (A$8.55 million) in a seed round led by Atlassian’s first external investor, US VC Accel.
The raise values the business at approximately $30 million. This cash will help us expand our engineering team and support our international growth.
Other investors include DST Global Partners (which was an early Facebook backer along with Accel), Mixture of Experts, Carya Venture Partners, Archangel Ventures, and NextGen Ventures.
Fluency had raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding in April last year.
Swinburne engineering graduates and self-taught developers Finlay Morcombe and Oliver Fernill, now 25, launched Fluency in 2023. They participated in the Swinburne Innovation Studio pre-accelerator, winning the Best Pitch award and the People’s Choice award in the subsequent accelerator. We are part of Startmate’s Summer ’25 cohort.
Work intelligence platforms capture how work is done across an organization, document it using AI, and outline insights for automation opportunities and transformation.
Morcom said the platform replaces the costly and time-consuming work of management consultants who document processes manually, and can create step-by-step guides with annotated screenshots, standard operating procedures, visual workflow maps, and more in days.
No integration required
No integration with existing systems is required, and from Salesforce to Excel, you can capture activity without connecting to your work applications.
The inspiration for Fluency came to Morcombe during his internship at a pension fund, where he had to manually document processes for transitioning from one team to another.
“Fluency was created after seeing a growing gap between AI ambitions at a leadership level and what teams can actually do with AI in the field,” he said.
“Companies are under pressure to deploy AI quickly, but most do not have a clear picture of how work will actually be done. Without an operational baseline, it is very difficult to understand where to deploy AI and know if it is delivering real benefits.”
The two-year-old startup counts insurance company AON, fashion group PVH Corp. and educational publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt among its customer base.
Accel partner Abhinav Chaturvedi said Fluency stands out because it focuses on operational fundamentals rather than experimentation for its own sake.
“AI capabilities are no longer the limiting factor; the real challenge is understanding where to apply AI,” he said.
