Women-focused superannuation fintech (anonymized)

This is a historical case file, 2017–2020: no company name appears anywhere in this account, and there is no live product to visit. That anonymity is a deliberate choice, not a gap -- the venture was a regulated financial-services business, and discretion with commercially sensitive detail is itself part of what this case file is showing. Co-founded a women-focused superannuation (pension) fintech in Australia, taking on strategy, technology architecture and product design as co-founder, against the hard constraint every seed-stage regulated startup faces: launch fast on an angel and seed runway, in a sector where compliance cannot be improvised.

Building the venture meant working the raise and the product at the same time: creating the investor materials behind a A$3.5m angel and seed round, selecting and contracting third parties for payments, open banking and a customer data platform (CDP), and building the front- and back-end MVP those integrations plugged into. Alongside the build, negotiating and securing the key suppliers a superannuation fund depends on -- trustee, investment managers, administrator -- and recruiting a senior team across growth marketing, technology and advertising to run what had been built.

The venture then hit a serious crisis. The response was to manage the board and investors through it directly, and to work through a refinancing that unlocked a turnaround -- the same turnaround that made the next funding round possible. The sequence, not the crisis itself, is the point: a company that could have failed instead kept its investors and reached its next raise.

What I'd do differently: build a cash-runway buffer into the plan from the start, rather than needing a turnaround to survive a crisis at all. It's a plainer lesson than it sounds, and it's the one this case file exists to be honest about.