A Perth-based on-demand wellness advice startup that wants to stop Australians from languishing on specialist waiting lists for months or years for appointments has raised $1 million in seed funding to expand its marketplace.
Anni was launched in October 2023 by founding partners Diranne Lee-Renwick, Anna Lee-Renwick and Timothy Smith to link users with wellness, health and wellbeing experts to help them solve problems or find the right product or service for them.
The funding raised by the Advice-as-a-Service (AaaS) platform was secured privately through high-net-worth individuals and family funds, the names of which have not been disclosed.
Anni is preparing to use the seed funding to bolster its platform, including by adding online video consults, digital goods, including downloadable meal plans and fitness guides, and distributed cross-platform on-demand advice.
Anni founder and CEO Diranne Lee-Renwick was a founding partner in the Harvest Technology Group in 2019, which grew to a global technology organisation with a market capitalisation of more than $220 million in 2021, and was the recipient of the technology innovation category in the 2020 Australian Business Awards.
He told SmartCompany it has been a long journey to get Anni to this point.
“Raising funds in this climate is tricky,” says Lee-Renwick.
“So the fact that we’ve done that I think is just testament to the concept of Anni and what it’s bringing to the market.
“We’re in this sort of era of misinformation and Anni is all about offering human intelligence. The ethos behind the platform when we built it was to give experts the ability to earn money from the knowledge that they already have.
“I think the most exciting thing is the fact that if you’re looking for a nutritionist or maybe a naturopath you can actually go on to Anni and find someone this afternoon absolutely guaranteed. There are so many people available that are ready to solve your problems.”
There are more than 250 Australian-based experts on the Anni platform, offering a range of services from beauty, parenting, naturopathy, nutrition, and dietary advice to relationship counseling, with over 16,000 hours of availability per week.
Through the platform, Anni experts set their own rates and schedules to suit their availability. They are then connected with new and existing clients and customers, delivering paid personalised video micro-consults.
The Anni application is available in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland with 1,300 users actively using the platform.
Lee-Renwick told SmartCompany he hopes Anni will enter the North American market by the end of 2024.
“We’re en route to build out the next offering which is the inclusion of digital goods, and then we will move into a distributed cross-platform on-demand advice platform that allows us to start integrating with other e-commerce platforms,” he says.
