Intersective
Intersective is a young company with a bold goal: to become the world’s leader in experiential education technology.
Need
With a successful domestic start to the business, Intersective looked to grow the business globally and needed finance to invest in product development.
Solution
Our Small Business Export Loan enabled the business to scale up its business faster and deliver its technology to new international customers.
Co-founders Beau Leese and Wes Sonnenreich started the company in 2012 after working in the education sector and with large businesses.
The challenge of creating effective work integrated learning programs across education and business convinced the duo to start up a new company to find a solution.
“Work integrated learning collaborations between employers, universities and students is actually a really hard problem. It is a three-party collaboration problem and it’s difficult, it’s expensive to manage, and it’s easy to go off track,” said Beau.
According to Beau, that problem now has a solution. The 'Practera’ software platform and products aim to make collaboration between students, universities and employers more efficient and effective, helping drive better learning and project outcomes.
Domestic success, global opportunities
With a successful domestic start to the business, Intersective looked to grow the business globally. However, global expansion doesn’t come without its own challenges, “Our major export challenge has been to engage effectively with large overseas organisations. This takes a bit more overhead than dealing domestically. We need to get legal advice to look at off-shore contracting and obviously need to travel to do that. So it’s more time intensive.
"But the chance to work with a forward-thinking partner in Vietnam, to deliver a new type of product and secure a long term licensing agreement, was an opportunity too good to pass up,” explained Beau.
Thanks to Export Finance Australia’s Small Business Export Loan, Intersective’s experiential learning software is building new connections in Asia.
Suzy Watson
Chief Financial Officer, Intersective
Scaling up with easy access to finance
With its bank unable to help due to lack of security, Intersective started researching financial options to invest in product development. Our Small Business Export Loan met its needs.
“Dealing with Export Finance Australia was so much more straight forward than dealing with a traditional bank or lender, including grant programs or invoice discounting; all of which we explored,” said Intersective’s CFO, Suzy Watson.
Designed specifically for small business exporters, the Small Business Export Loan provides unsecured loans of up to $350,000 for a single export contract.
“It was great to be able to choose the aspects of the financing that suited us best rather than being told this is the only thing available.
From starting the application to getting the funds was a period of fewer than seven days, and that included a couple of helpful calls from Export Finance Australia where we might have needed just a little clarity on the information required,” said Suzy.
"The ability to set up a direct debit and get SMS reminders were also a positive aspect of the process said Suzy.
Our Small Business Export Loan has helped Intersective scale-up its business faster than planned, Suzy explained, “it enabled us to kick that project off quickly, hire ahead of the curve, and be able to tick off all of the legal and economic questions we had around dealing in a cross-border transaction quickly.”
“Export Finance Australia has enabled us as a small company to deliver a technology product for a significant client offshore that will make the world of difference to us as an export-ready company,” concluded Beau.