{"id":461894,"date":"2026-06-05T06:01:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T06:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/461894\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T06:01:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T06:01:15","slug":"sa-brothers-launch-ai-startup-with-half-a-million-in-the-bag-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/461894\/","title":{"rendered":"SA brothers launch AI startup with half a million in the bag &#8211; News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">South Australian AI-powered email marketing platform Nitrosend has officially launched to the public today, the company\u2019s founders claiming it will save time and money for businesses.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">And it has launched with USD$500,000 (AUD$701,000) in seed funding courtesy of Eastend Ventures, <a class=\"underline\" href=\"https:\/\/www.indailysa.com.au\/news\/business\/2025\/07\/07\/sa-first-is-just-the-beginning-for-eastend-ventures\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">South Australia\u2019s first Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnership.<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">Nitrosend was created by brothers Edward and George Hartley, who previously founded SmartrMail \u2013 another email marketing platform that was sold to Relay Commerce in 2022 for an undisclosed sum. The duo was also the founders of online art market BlueThumb.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">\u201cThis isn\u2019t their first rodeo,\u201d Eastend Ventures founding partner Josh Garratt said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">\u201cThey\u2019ve built and sold a successful email marketing business before, and now they\u2019re back to do it again for an AI world.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">\u201cExperienced founders going after a market they already understand better than anyone, at exactly the moment that market is being reshaped by AI. That\u2019s the kind of investment Eastend was built to make.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">Nitrosend was built for small and mid-sized businesses that live online. The platform was aiming to replace traditional email builders; instead of dragging and dropping blocks around an editor, business owners describe what they want their email campaign to do.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">The platform then writes it, designs it, sends it and reports back on what worked.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">\u201cThere\u2019s this massive gap in the AI segment for transactional and marketing emails,\u201d Edward said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">\u201cBusinesses I\u2019ve been helping easily spend between 45 minutes and an hour writing and editing an email, which is quite a lot of time, particularly if your business has a big email list and you want to send two to three times a week.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">\u201cYou can do a prompt, and in five minutes you can have a very well-written email, and it\u2019s beautifully designed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">While the product officially launched today, it had been in beta mode since April. So far, about 190 users have been onboarded, with the volume of emails being produced doubling every week since.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">Edward said the Eastend Ventures funding would give the company an early-stage runway.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">\u201cWe get our engineers on board, we keep building product, we invest in some growth channels and we launch and scale it really hard and fast,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">\u201cWe\u2019ve seen how similar players that are not in the AI space necessarily can scale email, and it can be rapid if you reduce friction, and that\u2019s even without the kind of AI that we\u2019ve built.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 font-serif text-lg sm:text-lg group-[.is-premiumproperty]:font-sans\">\u201cWe think Nitrosend could be huge and from here it\u2019s really about keep building the product, keep the distribution and keep the awareness so that people know about it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"South Australian AI-powered email marketing platform Nitrosend has officially launched to the public today, the company\u2019s founders claiming&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[138,336,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-461894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-business","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}