Hyades Raises A$990K in Pre-Seed Round led by Icehouse Ventures

The funding round was led by Icehouse Ventures with support from K1W1 and angel investors Tony Falkenstein and Tim Brown.

In addition to the investment, Hyades also received a NZ$400,000 "New to R&D" grant from the New Zealand government to support its research and development efforts.

Hyades is building a new platform, which is currently in its early alpha stage. The platform brings together different types of complex data, such as spatial and map-based information, into one easy-to-understand system. This helps industries like insurance, agriculture, mining, and climate science use location-based data to make better business decisions.

The new funding will be used to work with enterprise partners, hire more AI engineers, and improve the platform before launching it to a wider market.

Hyades was founded by University of Auckland graduates Ashin Alex, Sam Kurian, and Jimin Seo.

Before starting Hyades, Ashin Alex worked on the physics startup Quantified Photonics. During his university research, he developed a ground-based optical receiver that could capture and decode signals from optical communication satellites.

Alex later teamed up with Sam Kurian, who is now the company's CTO. The idea started after Alex noticed in a physics lecture that Kurian did not take notes because he had already built a system to automatically collect and combine the information into a single dataset.

“Our vision is to enable AI agents to understand any set of high-dimensional data, even if it encompasses multiple forms that LLMs currently can’t really deal with,” Alex said.

“We’re tackling spatial data because it’s one of the hardest and most fragmented industries, with complex, messy data. We saw the mess as a challenge to be solved.”

“Everyone understands the need to better understand the risks from changing weather patterns and climate effects,” Alex said.

“In the wake of the Auckland floods and Cyclone Gabrielle, as well as weather events this year, we need to be able to make better sense of the wealth of geospatial data available.”