We're excited to share our investment in Flyweel's A$2.4m Pre-Seed round, which TEN13 is proud to have led, alongside QIC and Antler as well as industry angels including Matteo Leibowitz of Stake, Larry Diamond of Zip Co and Koen Köppen of Mollie and Klarna.
Flyweel is doing for ad spend what Stripe did for online payments - building the financial layer underneath it, so businesses can see what's actually working, move money to where it performs, and fund the gap instead of throttling campaigns while they wait for revenue to land.
The advertising stack has been rebuilt for AI speed, but the financial layer beneath it has not. AI tools can now generate creative, launch campaigns, run A/B tests, and optimise targeting at machine speed. Yet the money powering all of that is still managed by hand - tracked in spreadsheets, reconciled weeks after the fact, and funded on founders' credit cards. The faster ads run, the wider the gap grows between the velocity of spend and the reality of financial visibility.
That gap is exactly the opportunity. As AI accelerates how quickly businesses commit money to ad creation and spend, the financial control and management layer beneath it becomes more valuable, not less. An AI agent can spin up a campaign in minutes, but it can't request capital when performance crosses a threshold, pause an account approaching its limit, or reallocate budget across platforms against live financial data. That's the layer Flyweel is building.
Why we invested
- A team that has lived the problem: Reuben Scheckter (CEO) is a serial founder who has spent years managing ad budgets himself, with deep funnel experience - scaling a solar brand on digital ads and then building the B2B lead-generation platform Leadify to an exit. He built Flyweel because the cashflow and clarity problems he kept hitting as a founder weren't being solved. Matteo Calo (CTO) is a payments-infrastructure specialist who built the rails behind some of fintech's most consequential names - joining Adyen as one of its earliest employees, then building financing products at Mollie (European unicorn) and running payment systems at SEMrush. Their combination of go-to-market credibility and deep payments expertise is exactly what we look for at Pre-Seed.
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- AI is accelerating the problem, and Flyweel is building for the world that's coming: As AI automates ad execution and displaces the agencies that used to absorb this complexity, brands inherit the full financial-management burden without the tools to handle it. Every tool that makes ad execution faster widens the gap Flyweel closes.
- A category-creation play with a real moat: There is no incumbent financial operating system for performance marketers. Horizontal spend tools weren't designed around ad-performance mechanics, attribution tools don't control capital, and standalone lenders don't have the real-time integration. Flyweel starts with the data layer - which gives it visibility competitors don't have - and compounds it into a data flywheel: every dollar processed sharpens the model, and every integration deepens the workflow lock-in.
Problem
Ask any founder who has scaled a company on customer acquisition and they'll describe the same experience. They're staring at a dashboard full of spend data. Meta says the campaigns are working. Google says costs are up. The CRM shows the pipeline growing. But the bank account tells a different story - and the end-of-month reconciliation, done in a spreadsheet, is weeks behind reality. They're making million-dollar decisions with dated attribution.
What makes this striking is that the data needed to solve it already exists and is generated continuously - ad platforms produce real-time spend signals, payment processors see every transaction, and revenue tools track every lead. The problem is that those signals live in structurally separate systems that were never built to talk to each other, let alone to the financial layer of the business. This isn't a data problem; it's an infrastructure problem - and it shows up as three compounding pain points: no real-time clarity (finance and marketing look at different numbers), no control (budget changes that should take minutes take days), and no capital (even businesses with proven ROAS can't access financing built around their actual performance).
Solution
Flyweel connects ad platforms, accounting software, and CRMs into a single real-time view, turning advertising from an opaque expense into a predictable, data-driven investment. On top of that data foundation, the company is building the financial products - working capital and a purpose-built card - that make it the default way businesses fund and reconcile their ad spend.
The Intelligence Layer
Flyweel's product today is a unified intelligence layer. AdGrid pulls live data from Meta and Google, maps it against CRM pipeline data and Xero's accounting records, and produces a single real-time view of total spend, customers acquired, and blended CAC across every platform at once - for many users, the first time finance and marketing have looked at the same number. An AI Agent sits on top and makes all of it queryable in plain English, and Xero Reconciliation automatically syncs ad invoices into the ledger, eliminating a task that used to consume days of finance-team time each month.
The Financial Layer - Coming Next
From that foundation, Flyweel is building the money layer. Performance Capital offers short-term working capital underwritten against proven ad performance, so businesses can fund the next campaign cycle before revenue from the last one has landed. The Flyweel Card becomes the default payment method for ad spend, giving transaction-level visibility into every dollar as it's committed and feeding that data back into the platform. The long-term ambition is to be the financial rail beneath AI-driven media buying - the layer that controls what agents can spend, when they can access capital, and how it all reconciles against the P&L.
We're stoked to be working with Reuben, Matteo, and the Flyweel team, alongside QIC and Antler. Here's to building the missing financial rail for modern commerce.
Read more in the Startup Daily announcement and join the platform here.
Safe Travels,
The TEN13 Team