About
The intelligence layer between great founders and the capital they deserve.
Great companies come from everywhere — every background, every city, every path. When the right capital reaches the right founders, the world gets the cures, infrastructure, and tools the next generation needs. That matching shouldn't depend on who you know. That's what we're building.
Two founders. AI-native. Agent-built and -run.
The Founders
Who built NUVC?
We're not developers by training. We didn't go to Stanford or come from VC families. We're two first-generation immigrant founders in Melbourne — building an AI platform from scratch, without a traditional tech background, without inherited networks, and without the playbook that gets handed to people who already know the right people. We built NUVC with AI tools, brilliant advisors, and the collective wisdom of 184 Wade alumni who taught us how venture actually works.
We built the platform we needed because it didn't exist. The tools that help founders raise capital shouldn't only work for people who already have the network. NUVC is inclusive by design — not as a feature, but as a founding principle.
Tick Jiang, Founder, CEO & CTO — leads engineering, AI architecture, and product. CQF-certified quantitative finance professional who learnt AI while breastfeeding in 2019. Member of Victoria's Multicultural Tech & Innovation Advisory Group. Experienced private deal maker. Built the entire NUVC platform with an AI agent workforce — all with Claude Code, Cursor, and v0. Wade Institute Entrepreneur in Residence.
Duan Tianyi, Co-Founder & Creative Director — top-tier brand expert across China and Australia, ex-founder, and the creative force behind everything you see. Duan shapes the brand, the visual language, and the experience that makes complex intelligence feel intuitive. Every pixel was designed in Figma before a single line of code was written.
Jenks Guo, Advisor — frontend architecture and AI agentic orchestration. Jenks's guidance on how to structure multi-agent systems and build production-grade frontends turned ambitious ideas into working software.
The idea started from frustration: brilliant founders missing meetings not because they weren't good enough, but because the matching layer between them and their investors was broken. Emerging investors drowning in 100 decks with no systematic way to find signal.
So we built the thing we wished existed. A platform that gives both sides of the table the same lens — engineered for depth, designed for clarity, safeguarded by AI agents whose job is to protect the people we serve.
The unicorns of the next decade are being built right now. Most will never reach the investors who would have backed them. We're fixing that.
The Product Workforce
What AI agents does NUVC use?
When you upload a deck, screen a deal, or evaluate a fund, you're not running a tool. You're triggering a workforce. A multi-stage AI pipeline extracts, scores, verifies, enriches, matches, and benchmarks every deck in parallel, with a deeper layer of fund and thesis intelligence compounding underneath. We don't publish the internal architecture, but every score comes with a full breakdown of what moved it. Read the methodology →
It's AI all the way down
That product workforce runs inside NUVC every time a user scores a deck, screens a deal, or evaluates a fund. It was built and is maintained by a company workforce of specialised AI agents — organised by function (engineering, product, design, intelligence, growth, data ops, R&D, and user research) — that engineer, ship, and operate NUVC itself. Most AI startups have humans building AI features. We have AI building AI — directed by two founders and a senior partner network, not replacing them.
Principles
How We Build: Principles for AI-First Venture Intelligence
Honest Scoring
Every score is calibrated against 1,400+ labeled examples including 172 real VC deal memos and 85 known outcomes from SpaceX to Theranos. We don't inflate numbers to feel good. A 4.2 means you're not ready — and we tell you exactly why.
AI Serves. Humans Lead.
AI agents extract, verify, score, match, benchmark, research, and generate investment intelligence. Humans set the direction, make the calls, and hold the relationships.
Equal Access to Intelligence
A first-time founder in regional Australia gets the same depth of analysis as a well-networked repeat founder in San Francisco. Investors get AI-powered deal screening. The information asymmetry that plagues fundraising doesn't need to exist — and neither does the network advantage.
No Fabricated Claims
Every statistic on this platform is verifiable. No fake testimonials, no inflated metrics. Trust is the product.
Responsible AI
How does NUVC ensure fairness in AI scoring?
Demographic Attributes Aren't Collected
We deliberately do not collect founder gender, ethnicity, age, or educational prestige — by design, NuScore cannot discriminate on data we don't hold. A first-time founder from Melbourne is scored on the same merits as a repeat founder from Stanford. The deck speaks for itself.
Transparent by Default
Every score has a traceable reasoning chain — which data was used, how each lens was weighted, and what the AI could not verify. No black-box decisions.
Right to Appeal
Every founder can appeal a score and request human review. Scores above 9.5 or below 1.0 require human review before being shown.
Outcome Anomaly Monitoring
Our AI Governance layer monitors scoring outcomes by stage, industry, and geography to detect anomalous score clustering. Because we don't capture demographic attributes, we monitor the variables we do hold — and recalibrate when patterns disadvantage any cohort. The system earns fairness — it doesn't assume it.
Honest Confidence
If data is sparse, confidence says so. We never inflate certainty. A low-confidence score is labelled as directional, not definitive.
Outcome Accountability
We track whether scores predict actual funding outcomes. If they don't, we recalibrate. The model earns trust — it doesn't assume it.
Journey
From Idea to AI-Native Platform: The NUVC Timeline
Idea born — frustrated by the fundraising black box
First prototype — an AI judge scores a pitch deck. First AI agent goes live
Screened 600+ Startmate applicants in 4 hours — proved the model works at scale
70+ VC GP meetings, 50+ LP meetings — researched mandates, thesis, and how investors actually make decisions
Piloted with 47 VC users — learned what investors need vs what we assumed
NuScore v1 — 7-dimension scoring calibrated on 1,400+ real VC investment memos
Multi-agent AI pipeline operational + 24,000+ verified investors with vector embeddings
Public launch — nuvc.ai goes live. Agent-built and -run. Full AI agent workforce
AI agents organised across engineering, product, design, intelligence, growth, data ops, R&D, and user research. Investor portal for emerging VCs and family offices
Two humans. AI-native. Agent-built and -run
2
Human founders
24,000+
Verified investors
1,400+
VC decisions calibrated
AI-native
Agent-built and -run
Acknowledgements
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Where It Started
NUVC wouldn't exist without the Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship at the University of Melbourne. Over 184 Wade alumni — the Waders — shared their hard-won insights on VC process, deal systems, conviction frameworks, and what actually moves capital. That collective knowledge is baked into every scoring lens, every matching algorithm, and every intelligence layer on this platform.
Special thanks to the VCCatalyst programme alumni, teachers, and mentors who gave us direct access to how investors think — not the textbook version, but the real version. The pattern recognition, the conviction calls, the edge cases. That's what makes NUVC different from a generic AI wrapper.
Programs & Ecosystem
We're grateful to the programs that believed in NUVC early: AirTree Ventures Explorer Program — one of Australia's leading VCs opening their network to emerging founders. Startmate First Believers — the community that backs founders before anyone else will. Melbourne Connect — the innovation precinct where ideas meet infrastructure. The Startup Network — connecting Melbourne's founders when it matters most. LaunchVic — Victoria's startup agency, backing the ecosystem that backed us. Cambridge & Oxford Alumni Society Australia — connecting us to a global network of founders, investors, and advisors.
Advisors
Jenks Guo — frontend architecture and AI agentic orchestration. Jenks showed us how to structure multi-agent systems that work in production — the difference between an AI demo and an AI product people trust with real decisions.
We're also grateful to an advisor from OpenAI who provided early guidance on AI system design and production-grade LLM orchestration — insights that shaped how NUVC's scoring and intelligence agents think.
The VC Community
Deeply grateful to the Australian VC and investment community who gave us their time, feedback, and belief — including AirTree Ventures, Giant Leap, Rampersand, F5 Collective, Cornwalls Capital, Klumi Ventures, Tractor Ventures, Scale Investors, and Wolvies Ventures. Your openness to an AI-native approach to deal intelligence made this possible.
To every founder who uploaded a deck, every investor who gave feedback, every Wade alumnus who shared their VC war stories, and every mentor who took the call — this platform is built from what you taught us. Thank you.
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NUAI Pty Ltd (ABN 80 652 527 663), trading as NUVC · Melbourne, Australia