[#03] Flyweel Funded & Agentic Vision

Flyweel Pre-Seed Secured!

Flyweel Pre-Seed secured with Antler! Finally official. A hell of a push to get here, but Flyweel is properly funded and ready for the next stage. Now the real work starts.

Reflecting on a wild ride

After a few intense months – the kind of pitch sprints where daylight becomes optional – we've closed the pre-seed round with Antler.

Wasn't entirely smooth sailing. Had some late-stage feedback that threw us off slightly during the final pitches, leading to some over-correction then under-correction on our part. But we'd been deep in the weeds building, so the Q&A was straightforward. We know the space and sailed through it.

Incredibly grateful for the Antler team's support, guidance, and belief through the process. The intensity sharpens you.

(If you're thinking about building from day zero, the next Antler AUS14 intake is open. It's high velocity, pressure-tested, but sets you up properly for funding – not just with them, but beyond).

Jump in here and have a chat with the team if you've been staring out the window curious about what could be! They're all legends.

Big thanks to Matteo Calo

Nothing gets built without the right partner.

Matteo has shipped an alpha MVP in record time, even ran customer calls (and landed a few wins on those), pitched excellently, became our official/unofficial CFO as well as CTO in interim (lol) and moved mountains at pace the whole way through. He even made his way to the country to crash at my pad for a week (didn't do any mowing with me but that's OK!), put up with my quirks and esoteric monologues. Can't want for much more from a co-founder. What a guy.

Priority beta program oversubscribed

The Priority Beta user signup went 40% over our planned cap from 3x different continents

Collectively, the teams joining represent over $4.5m in monthly ad spend flowing through their systems. The waitlist keeps growing too (waitlist.flyweel.co) coming home with a wet sail. Big thanks to all our first customers, you know who you are and played a pivotal role.

Problem validation is never done, but this early traction confirms the pain is real. Manual tweaks, disconnected reporting, attribution gaps, endless workarounds just to connect spend to actual revenue outcomes. Finance needs one number, marketing sees another. Adjustments mean breaking context, opening another tab, crunching data after the fact.

An exciting product epiphany... Agentic AdSpendOps

Over Easter, between wrangling an AI agent for our site build and reflecting on the Antler feedback, we went back to first principles.

The core problem hasn't changed. The back-end we're building hasn't either.

But how users interact with AdSpendOps needs to feel native to where things are heading. Less clicking, more commanding.

We see Flyweel's natural path evolving towards an agentic interface.

Something like a command bar, natural language query driven with the stack connected behind it.

Instead of forcing you into our dashboard view, you ask for what you need:

• "Show spend and pipeline impact by channel last 7 days"
• "Raise Google budget by $1k"
• "Slice CPL by funnel stage"

It returns modular and generative outputs – data, visuals/charts, actions – without the usual dashboard gymnastics. Faster, more direct access to measurement and control, all connected.

You can still view/tweak manually in a more typical view if needed, we don't want you to be stuck when you need to get in the weeds of it but the entry point becomes intuitive, fast and means less clicks (death to clicks!)

One loop connecting spend, decisions, pipeline, and financials. Without leaving context.

It feels like the right way to kill the bloat for busy marketing managers, media buyers and C-suites of companies using multiple ad platforms with large spends (spend volume x stack complexity).

What's Next This Week

• Finalising round admin.
• MVP build for beta users in full swing.
• Full site + blog launching soon.
• More free tools planned.
• Community (likely Discord) coming.

Still plenty of chaos. Still learning. But the direction feels crystal clear, and we're feeling sharp!

If you're wrestling with advertising spend management headaches day-to-day, always open to chat!

Back to building.