Co-founders Hannah Hardy-Jones and Lucy Pink started the business in 2023 and have "bootstrapped" its growth until the injection of finance.
The funding round was oversubscribed, led by Altered Capital, with investment secured from Shearwater Capital (Australia), K1W1, Icehouse Ventures, Aspire NZ Seed Fund, Phase One Ventures and Exhort Ventures.
The company is valued at $16m after the raise.
Using AI, Contented’s technology captures conversations in meetings, video calls, conferences and talks to deliver automated documentation and business insights through customised templates.
A rapid rise in subscriptions followed an initial 18 months of consulting and customer research to build the product.
Ms Hardy-Jones said they wanted to internationally replicate a recipe which had worked well for them locally.
"We have a goal to get to $7m in revenue by December. We are at $1.5m and our goal to get to 700 to 800 customers by then would be incredible. And the goal within the next 12 months would be to have a larger footprint in Australia and really start leveraging our build."
She said they were happy with the way the capital round had played out to attract additional funds from a good spread of strategic investors.
"Lucy and I had set ourselves a goal we weren’t going to think about capital until we raised $1 million recurring subscription revenues. So that was our big goal — we wanted to get to that and then we knew we had something special, so when we presented to investors it didn’t feel like we were kind of banging down the door."
The tech entrepreneurs overachieved this in the past year from a handful of customers to more than $1.4m in annual recurring revenue.
Ms Pink, a former University of Otago student, is a self-taught developer and former founder of ethical fashion start-up Onyou while Ms Hardy-Jones is the former founder of The Kite Program, a mental health app.
Ms Hardy-Jones said they could have perhaps continued self-financing their business growth but wanted to "double-down" its acceleration with outside funding.
They had big goals to be involved in the most important conversations with major contributors such as the United Nations and Nasa, she said.
To do that at a slower pace was too difficult, as the world of AI was moving at pace, she said.
The co-founders remain the majority shareholders. Altered Capital is the lead shareholder in the investment group.
She said Contented’s rapid growth was because it was an ethical and caring company putting humans first with the best product on the note-taking subscription tool market.
"Our word of mouth is just incredible. We have pretty much done no marketing to this point which is a bit embarrassing and highly unusual. So when people say what do you do with Google Ads and this and that, we don’t do any of it."
That will change soon, with some of the fresh capital to be set aside for marketing.
They also plan to add more features, expand their customer base and push hard into new markets such as the United Kingdom and the United States.
More templates will be built for business areas such as human resources and recruitment as well as expand its integration with customer relationship management systems and Microsoft Office, and improve its AI technology.
The team will increase from five staff to about 15 during the next two months.
Ms Pink said they worked with businesses of all sizes from growing small to medium enterprises to some of the nation’s largest organisations.
"Alliance Group is a great example. [It] uses Contented to record meetings across the business, from plant floors to the boardroom, turning them into their key documents — meeting minutes, health and safety reports, and more."
Contented’s conversational tool is supplied to more than 200 customers globally, including companies and enterprises in wealth management, healthcare and government.
Strong growth is being experienced in financial services attracted to technology generating a statement of advice, assets and liabilities table, family tree and a LinkedIn thought leadership article from a client meeting.
Customers include Synlait, Craigs Investment Partners, Alliance, Awanui Group, Christchurch Airport and Apollo Projects.
Further south, the platform is used by PH Wealth, Larnach Castle, Central Financial Planning, and McCulloch and Partners.
Altered Capital investment director Finn Templeton said Contented’s growth trajectory was among the fastest his company had seen in New Zealand.
"It’s a testament to both the product as well as Lucy and Hannah as founders."
