AI now captures more than 50% of all global venture capital, with approximately $110 billion invested in AI in the first half of 2025. Gartner data positions cybersecurity and generative AI as the top investment categories of the year.
A recent webinar, entitled “Investing in AI: what’s working, what’s evolving, what’s next”brought together the ORCA Opti founding team to outline the current state of AI investment and position the Australian compliance automation company as an example of what it describes as the sustainable business foundations of AI.
Investors keen on major innovations in AI
Kathryn Giudes, Executive Director of ORCA Opti, revealed two strategic acquisitions the company has made with the funding received to date. The first, TalkVia AI, provides the conversational AI engine that powers the platform and brought together the co-founder and CTO, Phoenix Guy in the company. The second, Red-Tie AI, has been renamed AI Guardian and protects against 36 attack vectors, including rapid injection and privacy breaches.
Giudes, who spent two decades at Microsoft and Amazon, where she helped generate $2.5 billion in revenue, including launching the Xbox games marketplace, acknowledged mixed feelings around investing in AI but pointed to venture capital activity as evidence of continued confidence in the sector.
“There was initially a lot of positive talk, and now a lot of negative talk about AI in the market,” Giudes said. “I think what I would like to highlight is that actions speak louder than words, and over 50% of venture capital firms around the world are investing in companies that are either AI-enabled or are making AI a significant part of their offering.”
The guides highlighted research from McKinsey and Deloitte identifying regulated verticals with audit trail requirements as the biggest opportunity in AI.
Startup failure rates and advice from wise investors
Phoenix Guy, technical director, ORCA Opti
CTO Phoenix Guy continued the presentation with a statistic that he believes should shape how investors view the industry: around 90% of AI startups fail within their first year.
“This may sound really alarming, but for savvy investors, this is actually incredibly useful information,” Guy said. “If you walked into an auto shop knowing that nine out of ten vehicles are lemons, you wouldn’t just walk away, but you would know exactly what questions to ask before you buy.”
Guy attributed the high failure rate to the lack of proprietary technology among many AI companies. He estimated that 78% of AI startups launched in 2024 were “AI wrappers” with no unique substance.
“I call it building a toll booth on someone else’s highway. They don’t have any proprietary technology. There’s no unique data and there’s no defensible position,” he said. “As soon as the underlying platform changes or a competitor appears, they’re done.”
What makes an investment in AI sustainable?
The presentation highlighted four elements that Guy believes set sustainable AI investments apart from the rest: compliance frameworks aligned with regulatory standards, solutions addressing trust and governance in regulated sectors, data sovereignty capabilities, and ownership of business process workflows.
“When you capture how an organization actually works, its processes, its decisions, that becomes the crown jewel,” Guy said. “This is where AI automation meets real added value. A competitor cannot copy your client’s entire way of working.
“(I’m telling you all this because) ORCA Opti passes the overall test on all four counts: we are designed for AI regulation with humans in the loop by design; we solve the trust problem for regulated industries; and we operate within sovereign borders.”
Platform positioning and competition
ORCA Opti is positioned as an enterprise automation and compliance platform integrated into Microsoft environments, offering conversational AI voice assistance as well as dashboards for eHealth, operational risk and compliance monitoring.
Giudes has identified two US-based competitors with market capitalizations between $2 billion and $4.15 billion as major players in the sector. She said the main difference was that these platforms focused on validating compliance through templates and spot checks, while ORCA Opti automated the business processes themselves.
“A model is only as good as the person using it and the organization that makes it exist,” Giudes said. “If they have a model but they don’t follow it, they’re still not compliant.”
Describing the product, Giudes described two fundamental elements. Opti Assist is a conversational AI interface that allows users to ask questions and create documents, with built-in privacy protection that removes sensitive data from prompts before querying external models and reinserts it for user response.
The price is $5,000 per company per year. The core platform provides dashboards, incident management, and risk and regulatory tools aligned with industry standards, including ISO compliance.
Additional modules include cyber protection with ongoing parameter validation, a security operations center for automatic compromise escalation, and an ESG program meeting AASB S3 reporting standards.
Roadmap for customer traction and growth of AI startups
The company had approximately 20 paying customers and two partnerships as of December 2025, with revenue generated in the human resources, academia, defense and logistics sectors.
A case study highlighted the Charlie the Virtual Veteran project for the Queensland State Library and Anzac Memorial, where AI Guardian technology blocked 476 attacks across more than 15,000 user sessions in the first 48 hours of deployment.
ORCA Opti has outlined a roadmap targeting positive cash flow status by April 2026, international expansion into North America and Europe by the end of 2026 and an IPO in Q2 2027, with ASX and NASDAQ under consideration.
Giudes said the current capital raise would accelerate product development, fund marketing expansion and support dedicated sales hiring focused on partner and reseller channels.
“We had paying customers when we opened the business,” Giudes said. “In my opinion, if you can get people to pay for your product, that’s how you know your product is market fit.”
About Orca Opti
ORCA Opti is a holistic business operating system that improves business health by automating and aligning the routines that keep organizations running: guided workflows aligned with standard operating procedures, incident and task logging, evidence capture, risk register updates, and board-ready reporting. Using plain English prompts and guardrails, ORCA helps any team member execute correctly the first time. No forms, no copy-pasting, no missed steps.
Link to webinar recording: Webinar | Orca Opti website