Investment Notes: Springboards

We are pleased to announce that Blackbird has led a $5M funding round into Springboards alongside strategic industry angels.

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AI to Inspire

‍Springboards is an AI-core platform purpose built for creative professionals in the advertising industry. 

It offers a suite of tools designed to inspire, not replace, human creativity and individualism and help teams explore ideas faster, more effectively, and collaboratively.

Springboards combines opinionated workflows, AI, and collaboration features into a beautiful and intuitive UI that guides users through the creative process from initial research and ideation through to project execution and outputs (brand assets, briefs, etc). 

Features include:

• Insights Digger: Extracts brand insights from vast data sets.
• Campaign Concepts: Generates fresh creative ideas tailored to different tones and objectives.
• Validator Tool: Provides evidence to back up strategic decisions and creative approaches.
• Sparks Feature: Allows users to adjust the AI’s spontaneity, encouraging unexpected creative leaps.
• Canvas: Allows teams to work together seamlessly across disciplines and locations. 

If everything goes right, Springboards will become the default platform on which creative decisions are made, executed, and measured end-to-end. 

Springboards has already garnered the support of over 120 agency partners worldwide, including Cummins & Partners, Jellyfish, BMF, TRG, SAMY, and Cutwater.

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A Contrarian Perspective

There has been a lot of noise with AI in marketing, but Springboards’ core beliefs and approach stand it apart.

Most AI applications and LLMs today are designed to drive users toward answers and outputs (input prompt, output assets). This throttles the creative process itself. 

As cofounder Amy says, “Creativity in advertising is under siege. Shrinking margins, skyrocketing pitching costs, and ever-higher client expectations are threatening the craft. We built Springboards to help creatives do what they do best: think big, explore boldly, and stay original.”

Springboards is flipping the script and believes in a process where human creativity and ingenuity is enhanced, not endangered, by AI. 

It achieves this through product innovation at both the application level (guided human-in-the-loop inspiration workflows) and the infrastructure level (finetuning and orchestrating AI models to better orient them toward creative variability). Springboards’ AI has already proven to generate 10–30x more creative diversity than OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini combined. 

For advertising creatives that live and die by the quality and speed of their creative process, this is a painkiller, not vitamin, solution. 

Tim Collier of Cummins & Partners says, “Springboards is a game-changer. It helps teams focus on the most interesting and challenging part of our jobs - finding original ideas that connect deeply with people. It’s not about devaluing creativity; it’s about enhancing it.”

Christina Aventi of BMF says, “it helps uncover insights to marinate upon that improve your thinking… It gives you a stimulus that can shift where you were first going, and push you into more interesting places. More insights, more ideas. And it’s actually surprising what triggers a new thread of your thinking, helping you make connections you wouldn’t ordinarily.”

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When Bad Customers Turn Good

We recently published a river of inquiry into the emerging category of “vertical SaiS” - AI-core software targeted at individuals bottoms up within niche verticals. Springboards fits squarely in this thesis.

Marketing agencies and freelancers have historically been challenging customers to reach and serve. They don’t spend much on software (low ACVs), they are generally acquired through higher touch enterprise sales, and they operate amongst a sea of solutions. 

Like we have seen in other verticals, Springboards has not only developed a beautiful product but also reinvented the go-to market. Powered by AI, it has a powerful single-user mode driving high engagement and underscoring an effective bottoms up land-and-expand motion. 

Some users have circumvented their organisation’s procurement processes just to get access to the software. And industry influencers are excited too… 

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Unlikely Places

Surprisingly, Springboards is founded and HQ’ed in Noosa, Queensland! 🏖️

It is exciting to see such strong innovation emerge from new and unexpected parts of the country. 

The company is cofounded by husband and wife duo Pip (CEO) and Amy (CCO), along with Kieren (CTO). 

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Pip and Amy have been in the marketing agency world their entire careers and have a deep empathy for the customer which roots the platform’s design and roadmap.

Curing the COVID pandemic, Pip and Amy taught themselves how to code as a way to improve their own creative workflows. What started as a side project rolled into a MVP, and now a global mission. 

Kieran is a complete gem of a CTO and a perfect fit for this vision. He is a self-defined “creative technologist” who is part artist (undergrad visual artists) x engineer (ex-Google) x data scientist (with a PHD in machine learning from ANU). His personal website is a hoot!

We are excited to be working with this team. 

‍Tom, on behalf of Blackbird