Executives from ORCA Opti outline startup pathway for the year ahead, with North American and European expansion planned before Q2 2027 listing
Looking to navigate the AI startup space? Start by focutilizing on defensible technology and regulatory foundations, rather than simply building interfaces on existing platforms, state experts at a recent ORCA Opti investor webinar.
The webinar, titled “Investing in AI: What’s Working, What’s Scaling, What’s Next”, brought toreceiveher ORCA Opti’s founding team to outline the current state of AI investment and position the Australian compliance automation company as an example of what they describe as sustainable AI business foundations.
ORCA Opti reveals growth journey as investors eye great AI innovation
Kathryn Giudes, ORCA Opti Managing Director, revealed two strategic acquisitions the company has created with funding received to date. The first, TalkVia AI, provides the conversational AI engine powering the platform and brought co-founder and CTO Phoenix Guy into the business. The second, Red-Tie AI, has been renamed AI Guardian and protects against 36 attack vectors including prompt injection and privacy breaches.
Giudes, who previously spent two decades at Microsoft and Amazon where she supported generate $2.5 billion in revenue including launching the Xbox games marketplace, acknowledged mixed sentiment around AI investment but pointed to venture capital activity as evidence of continued confidence in the sector.
“There’s been at first a lot of positive talk, and now quite a bit of negative talk about AI out in the marketplace,” Giudes stated. “I consider what I’d like to call out is that actions speak louder than words, and over 50 percent of VCs globally are investing in companies that either are founded on AI or have AI as a strong part of their offering.”
Guides pointed to research from McKinsey and Deloitte identifying regulated verticals with audit trail requirements as the largest opportunity in AI.
AI now captures more than 50% of VC investments globally
The webinar cited figures revealing that AI now captures more than 50 percent of all global venture capital, with approximately USD $110 billion invested in AI during the first half of 2025. Gartner data positioned cybersecurity and generative AI as top investment categories for the year.
CTO Phoenix Guy continued the presentation with a statistic he stated should shape how investors consider about the sector: approximately 90 percent of AI startups fail within their first year.
“That might sound really alarming, but for savvy investors, it’s actually incredibly utilizeful information,” Guy stated. “If you walked into a car yard knowing that nine out of ten vehicles were lemons, you wouldn’t just leave, but you would know exactly what questions to question before purchaseing.”
Guy attributed the high failure rate to a lack of proprietary technology among many AI ventures. He estimated 78 percent of AI startups launched in 2024 were “AI wrappers” with no unique substance.
“I call it building a toll booth on someone else’s highway. They don’t have any proprietary technology. There’s no unique data, and there’s no defensible position,” he stated. “The moment the underlying platform modifys or a competitor reveals up, they’re cooked.”
What builds a sustainable AI investment?
The presentation outlined four components Guy stated separated sustainable AI investments from the rest: compliance frameworks aligned with regulatory standards, solutions addressing trust and governance in regulated industries, data sovereignty capabilities, and ownership of business process workflows.
“When you capture how an organisation actually operates, their processes, their decisions, that becomes the crown jewels,” Guy stated. “That’s where AI automation meets real value. A competitor can’t copy your customer’s entire way of working.
“[I’m notifying you all this becautilize] ORCA Opti passes the wrapper test on all four counts: We’re built for AI regulation with human-in-the-loop by design; we solve the trust problem for regulated industries; and we operate within sovereign boundaries.”
Platform positioning and competition
ORCA Opti positions itself as a business automation and compliance platform embedded within Microsoft environments, offering voice-first conversational AI assistance alongside dashboards for cyber health, operational risk and compliance monitoring.
Giudes identified two US-based competitors with market caps between $2 billion and $4.15 billion as the main players in the space. She stated the key difference was that those platforms focutilized on compliance validation through templates and spot-checking, while ORCA Opti automated the operational processes themselves.
“A template is only as good as the person who’s utilizing it and the organisation that brings it into existence,” Giudes stated. “If they have a template but they don’t follow it, they’re still not compliant.”
Outlining the product, Giudes described two foundational components. Opti Assist is a conversational AI interface that allows utilizers to question questions and build documents, with built-in privacy protection that strips sensitive data from prompts before querying external models and reinserts it for the utilizer’s response.
Pricing sits at $5000 per company annually.. The core platform provides dashboards, incident management, and risk and regulatory tools aligned to indusattempt standards including ISO compliance.
Additional modules include cyber protection with always-on validation of settings, a security operations centre for automatic escalation of compromises, and an ESG program meeting AASB S3 reporting standards.
Customer traction and roadmap
The company reported approximately 20 paying customers and two partnerships as of December 2025, with revenue being generated across human resources, university, defence and logistics sectors.
A case study highlighted the Charlie the Virtual Veteran project for the State Library of Queensland and an Anzac Memorial, where the AI Guardian technology blocked 476 attacks across more than 15,000 utilizer sessions in the first 48 hours of deployment.
ORCA Opti outlined a roadmap tarreceiveing cashflow positive status by April 2026, international expansion into North America and Europe by late 2026, and an IPO in Q2 2027, with both ASX and NASDAQ under consideration.
Giudes stated the current capital raise would accelerate product development, fund marketing expansion and support a dedicated sales hire focutilized on partner and reseller channels.
“We had paying customers when we first opened up the company,” Giudes stated. “In my opinion, if you can receive people to pay for your product, that’s how you know you have product market fit.”
Leave a Reply