We are excited to announce GD1 Fund 3’s early Seed stage investment in Vxt, a fast-growing smart communications SaaS platform. Vxt automates repetitive, time-intensive administrative tasks, addressing a huge global market of high-call-volume professional service sectors.

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Vxt’s intuitive interface records phone and video calls (landline/mobile/any device with browser functionality) in order to transcribe notes, capture billable hours, and maintain communication records via direct integration with relevant customer applications. Using machine-learning technology, they’re working towards automating data extraction to populate customer-relevant documents with key information.

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Currently, Vxt are focused on the legal community, but long-term the Vxt team are ambitious about capturing the entire spectrum of communications administrative work, empowering people to spend more time on value-generating tasks. We’re incredibly proud to be supporting them along the way.

People and Culture

Vxt was launched in November 2018 by two young, raw, energetic, and ambitious co-founders, Luke Campbell and Lucy Turner. The pair worked on Vxt part-time whilst finishing their bachelor degrees at the University of Canterbury, before transitioning to full time in late 2019. 

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Luke and Lucy’s  relentless drive to understand customer pain points in a thoughtful and methodical way compensates markedly for any lack of domain experience. Continuous customer engagement has already prompted an early product pivot, and not many founders have the wherewithal to implement changes resulting in a material difference to their traction. Equally, the pressures of student life have ensured they’re both aligned in their vision and comfortable working in a capital-efficient manner.

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Finally, Vxt demonstrates best-in-class culture, with no employee attrition since inception, and demonstrable ability to attract top engineering talent coming out of the university system. 

Customer and Value Proposition 

We’ve been extremely impressed with Vxt’s global customer focus and speed to pivot the company’s development efforts based on early customer feedback. 

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Vxt delivers their customers real value, with a simple onboarding process and no need for extensive specialised training. The addition of alternative channels (such as chat) to the platform, with negligible onboarding and direct costs, will open up additional opportunities for further product-led growth. 

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High-call-volume professional service industries (legal firms, recruitment agencies, etc) tend to be highly adaptable early technology adopters, as shown by their rapid uptake of cloud-based communication tools driven by Covid. Target customers are typically time-poor, and  administrative tasks (writing notes, billing, adherence to compliance requirements, etc) introduce perceived inefficiencies and low perceived value delivered. In addition to freeing up time by automating these painful-but-necessary tasks, Vxt helps ensure that customers avoid incomplete administration, which can lead to massive financial and regulatory risks. 

Side note

A strong indication of the founders’ pedigree was made fully apparent when Vxt was judged runner-up for the 2021 Twilio Startup Awards competition, with high early praise from the impressive judging panel: 

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• Jason Calacanis – legendary tech entrepreneur/ex-Sequoia Capital/angel investor (well known for making early angel investments in Uber and Robinhood).
• Christine Tsai – founding Partner, 500 Global (investments in Canva, Udemy, Talkdesk, GitLab) .
• Byron Deeter – Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners (investments in DocuSign, Twilio, Box, SendGrid). 

Final thoughts

In closing, I would like to show my sincere appreciation to all those who helped make this investment happen. Thank you to Vxt’s founders, Luke and Lucy, for believing in GD1 as a trusted partner and allowing us to join your incredible journey. We are delighted to be working closely with you and the Vxt team.

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Thanks also to my team (a special shout out to Vignesh Kumar and Heather Gadonniex with your help  along the way) for your never-ending support. Lastly, thank you to Mahesh Muralidhar, the founder of Phase One Ventures, for your tireless early passion and support of Vxt. We look forward to working with you again in the future! 

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Read our GD1 portfolio company profile here.

Vxt contact information

Website: www.vxt.co.nz

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/vxtapp

Twitter: twitter.com/Vxtapp

Instagram: www.instagram.com/vxtapp

Android and iOS App: apps.apple.com/nz/app/vxt-call-video-voicemail

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In the media

When Vxt Founder Luke Campbell is asked to describes his product in simple terms, those terms are: “People fu&*ing hate admin!” - Startup Daily feature July 18th 2022.

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Startup Daily 18 July: admin, surveillance & cybersecurity - Aus Biz interview with Simon Thompson, featured between 2:40 - 9:25 minutes

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The next big thing for Kiwi startup Vxt - Business Desk feature July 15th 2021.

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Awards

Momentum Student Entrepreneur Award of the year - "Described by the judges as ‘an inspirational leader of people and an active entrepreneur on a relentless in his mission." - Luke Campbell

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The 2021 KiwiNet Research Commercialisation Awards finalists - Luke Campbell, University of Canterbury: Millions of calls made smarter with Vxt

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