According to ORCA Opti partners and investors navigating the AI startup landscape should prioritise companies with defensible technology and strong regulatory foundations, rather than those simply building interfaces on existing platforms.

AI now attracts more than 50% of global venture capital, with around USD $110 billion invested in the first half of 2025, while Gartner lists cybersecurity and generative AI among the year’s top investment categories.

ORCA Opti’s founding team recently outlined the current state of AI investment and what it describes as the foundations of sustainable AI businesses.

Investors keen on great AI innovation

Kathryn Giudes, ORCA Opti Managing Director, revealed two strategic acquisitions the company has made with funding received to date.

The first, TalkVia AI, provides the conversational AI engine powering the platform and brought co-founder and CTO Phoenix Guy into the business.

The second, Red-Tie AI, has been renamed AI Guardian and protects against 36 attack vectors including prompt injection and privacy breaches.

Giudes, who previously spent two decades at Microsoft and Amazon where she helped generate $2.5 billion in revenue including launching the Xbox games marketplace, acknowledged mixed sentiment around AI investment but pointed to venture capital activity as evidence of continued confidence in the sector.

“There’s been at first a lot of positive talk, and now quite a bit of negative talk about AI out in the marketplace,”

“I think what I’d like to call out is that actions speak louder than words, and over 50 percent of VCs globally are investing in companies that either are founded on AI or have AI as a strong part of their offering.” Giudes said.

Platform Positioning & Competition

ORCA Opti positions itself as a business automation and compliance platform embedded within Microsoft environments, offering voice-first conversational AI assistance alongside dashboards for cyber health, operational risk and compliance monitoring.

Giudes identified two US-based competitors with market caps between $2 billion and $4.15 billion as the main players in the space.

She says the key difference was that those platforms focused on compliance validation through templates and spot-checking, while ORCA Opti automated the operational processes themselves.

“A template is only as good as the person who’s using it and the organisation that brings it into existence,” Giudes said. “If they have a template but they don’t follow it, they’re still not compliant.”

“When you capture how an organisation actually operates, their processes, their decisions, that becomes the crown jewels,” Guy added. “That’s where AI automation meets real value. A competitor can’t copy your customer’s entire way of working.

 “[I’m telling you all this because] ORCA Opti passes the wrapper test on all four counts: We’re built for AI regulation with human-in-the-loop by design; we solve the trust problem for regulated industries; and we operate within sovereign boundaries.”

ORCA Opti’s Latest Solutions

Outlining the product, Giudes described two foundational components. Opti Assist is a conversational AI interface that allows users to ask questions and build documents, with built-in privacy protection that strips sensitive data from prompts before querying external models and reinserts it for the user’s response. 

Pricing sits at $5000 per company annually.. The core platform provides dashboards, incident management, and risk and regulatory tools aligned to industry standards including ISO compliance.

Additional modules include cyber protection with always-on validation of settings, a security operations centre for automatic escalation of compromises, and an ESG program meeting AASB S3 reporting standards.

Roadmap : Customer Traction & AI Startup Growth

The company reported approximately 20 paying customers and two partnerships as of December 2025, with revenue being generated across human resources, university, defence and logistics sectors.

A case study highlighted the Charlie the Virtual Veteran project for the State Library of Queensland and an Anzac Memorial, where the AI Guardian technology blocked 476 attacks across more than 15,000 user sessions in the first 48 hours of deployment.

ORCA Opti outlined a roadmap targeting cashflow positive status by April 2026, international expansion into North America and Europe by late 2026, and an IPO in Q2 2027, with both ASX and NASDAQ under consideration.

Giudes said the current capital raise would accelerate product development, fund marketing expansion and support a dedicated sales hire focused on partner and reseller channels.

“We had paying customers when we first opened up the company,” Giudes said. “In my opinion, if you can get people to pay for your product, that’s how you know you have product market fit.”