Aether, a New Zealand-based AI startup that transforms marketing presentations into live, interactive documents, has raised NZ$3.8 million in Seed funding.
The SaaS platform, co-founded by former TikTok NZ country manager Carsten Grueber, has come out of stealth with backing from Icehouse Ventures and Brand Fund 2. Aether was built out of New+Improved, the venture studio behind Tracksuit and Ideally. The startup has already secured enterprise customers in Australia, New Zealand, and the US, reaching NZ$600,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR), with more than half of that coming from Australia.
Aether was co-founded in 2025 by Ursula von Keisenberg, former ANZ MD at Timely and sales lead at Xero Asia. With offices in Auckland and Melbourne, the new funding will go toward product development and expanding the team across Australia and New Zealand.
“They say measure twice, cut once, and this should also be true of marketing workflows. As it stands, most slide decks are recut every time a presentation happens, wasting valuable resources from internal teams,” he said.
“Aether transforms presentations from static documents into living, connected assets that are accurate, always up-to-date, and ready to share. Instead of marketers spending half a week building the monthly performance report, they can spend that same time doing the actual marketing itself.”
Aether’s software connects live data directly into presentations and documents, helping marketers save a lot of time that would normally be spent on manual copy-pasting.
Once connected to a company’s data, Aether can quickly create branded presentations in just minutes, and the information inside them automatically updates whenever the data changes.
According to Grueber, customers are already using Aether for things like board packs, quarterly business reviews, campaign reports, agency briefs, and knowledge management.
“In minutes, Aether can take 150 marketing reports, in 12 different languages and distill it all down to the 10 slides that matter; assess and strengthen your latest idea, plan or brief against your marketing strategy; or create exec-ready presentations reporting last month’s performance with key charts and commentary,” he said.
Simon Pound, co-founder of New+Improved, said Aether is the first startup to be launched from their venture studio. The idea was developed after speaking with hundreds of marketing leaders and enterprise marketing teams to understand their challenges.
Aether represents a bigger opportunity than any of us have seen before,” he said.
Now, with strong revenue, big global enterprise customers, and the backing of major investors, we’re ready to scale. We believe Aether could be the next breakout SaaS success story from this region.”
Icehouse Ventures partner Barnaby Marshall described the software startup as “the dream intersection of clear problem, scalable solution, and strong team”.
“Aether is solving a universal pain point, and the traction they’ve achieved with global enterprise customers before launch is remarkable,” he said.
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