BeingIconic, the Australian growth consultancy which transitions businesses through their scale-up journey, has completed a $1 million capital raise to drive local and international expansion.
BeingIconic supports companies to scale outside of existing internal capabilities through flexible delivery of strategic marketing, network expansion, commercial and operational expertise.
It was founded by Peter Brocklebank, chairman of UK creative services agency bbp; former Red Bull head of brand and Samsung head of marketing, Ian Bell; Steven Arnold, founder and creative director at Iconika Venture Brands and former design director at Ideaworks and Kay Trippner, CFO and CCO at biotech company Headsafe.
Following successful collaborations with over 50 scale-ups, BeingIconic has closed a $1 million pre-seed friends and family capital raise to expand operations to Asia and the UK, build out strategy and client services teams as well as investing in marketing and business development.
The first round of shareholders include leading investors and executives from Australia and Asia’s marketing, scale-up and technology sectors.
Investors include BeingIconic non-executive director and strategic advisor, Mike Wilson, who launched and was chairman and CEO of Havas Media Australia and co-founder of Naked Communications; James Neale, former Clemenger Group board director and national CEO of Traffik Marketing; Jack Byrne, founder and managing director of award-winning independent media agency Hatched and Simon Porter, head of retail at Hatched; and Jason P Ross, investor and former heat of creative at JWT. Ross’s investment portfolio includes creative innovation platform, Exceptional Alien.
Singapore-based Avyan Holdings, part of Avyan Global, a creative human experience design-led collective, is a major investor in BeingIconic.Avyan is led by Vishnu Mohan, the former group chair and CEO of Havas in South East Asia, India, Japan and Korea.
Peter Brocklebank, partner and managing director, BeingIconic said: “Since launching two years ago, we have taken a deliberate and staged approach to validate the proposition to ensure it delivers for companies ready for their scale-up journey. Scale-ups typically don’t fail because they don’t have a great product, they fail because they only have a great product. BeingIconic brings deep insights, expertise and networks to fuel the next phase of growth by becoming an integral part of their teams through expert guidance across marketing, operations and finance functions.
“Our new investors not only enable us to expand the BeingIconic offer to Asia, UK and beyond, they are a collective of partners who intrinsically understand the ecosystem and can support us with their own insights, experience and connections.”
Defined by the OECD as a company with an average annualised return of at least 20 percent, there are estimated to be more than 35,000 scale-up companies in Australia_(State of Australian Start Up Funding 2021)._
Industry and category agnostic, BeingIconic works with scale-ups including espresso Displays, award-winning creators of the world’s thinnest portable monitor; UK-based CrowdProperty, on the Australian launch of the UK-based fintech business and technology innovation company Olinqua.
Ian Bell, partner and chief innovation officer, BeingIconic said: “There are significant opportunities to take the product and service innovations of Australian businesses and expand them out to new markets. BeingIconic’s mission is to grow these entrepreneurial scale-ups beyond their internal potential, be a trusted partner and help them realise their ambitions. The founders together with our new shareholders are experienced in doing just that. Now we are bringing this combined experience, and that of our wider team, to even more Australian scale-ups and those in Asia and the UK as well.”
In addition to collaborating with scale-ups directly, BeingIconic works with established capital raising partners and their clients, including OnMarket, Australia’s largest equity raising platform and Microsoft For Startups, the corporate venture capital subsidiary of Microsoft, amongst others.