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Advanced Raises $2.3 Million in Equity to Fund Australian R&D
As covered by Startup Daily, 7 May 2025
Advanced is the company featured in this coverage. This article summarises and contextualises the original Startup Daily reporting.
The raise was oversubscribed before Simon Thomsen published the story in Startup Daily on 7 May 2025. That's the detail that matters most: a Sunshine Coast-based fintech, operating in a niche most Australian investors hadn't encountered, closed a raise with more demand than supply before the ink dried.
The structure
Advanced raised $2.3 million in equity as part of a $25 million total lending facility. The facility is roughly 90% debt funding, with the equity component anchored by Employment Hero director Adrian Bunter, former Queensland Chief Entrepreneur Wayne Gerard, former Acclaim Wealth boss Alan Hegerty, and QIC private equity principal Phil Cummins, who joined the Advanced board as part of the deal.
The facility lends against a startup's future R&D Tax Incentive refund. That refund was always coming. Advanced moves it forward.
Who backed it and why it matters
Adrian Bunter helped build Employment Hero to over three million users. Wayne Gerard spent years as Queensland's Chief Entrepreneur watching founders hit funding walls. Phil Cummins deployed capital through QIC, one of Australia's largest institutional investors. They didn't back Advanced as a financial exercise. They backed it because they'd watched companies stall while waiting nine months for an R&D refund that was already owed to them.
That's the specific problem Advanced solves. The investors recognised it because they'd seen it go unsolved.
50 loans already done before the raise closed
By the time Startup Daily published the story, Advanced had already completed more than 50 R&D finance loans across biotech, manufacturing, software and deeptech. Borrowers included Rainstick, Sicona Battery Technologies, GapDrone and HowToo.
Alex told Startup Daily:
"Our north star goal, our 'big hairy audacious goal' in startup terms, is to generate a cumulative billion dollars of economic impact in Australia in the next five years."
The path there: companies access their R&D Tax Incentive early, reinvest into more R&D, grow the refund, access it early again. Four or five cycles and a company has compounded significantly beyond what a single end-of-year refund would have allowed.
Australian-owned, returns stay here
Several competitors in this space are offshore operations. Their returns leave the ecosystem. Advanced is founded in Coolum, Queensland, and the returns stay in Australia. Alex built it that way deliberately.
Read the original Startup Daily coverage: https://www.startupdaily.net/topic/funding/queensland-rd-finance-fintech-raises-2-3-million/
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