23-year-old Annie Liao has had a few careers in her young life: a data scientist, consultant, venture capitalist, community builder and now start-up founder. Liao talks about Build Club, a community-turned-accelerator-turned-AI-education-platform, which has just closed its first capital raise.
Forbes Australia’s inaugural 30 Under 30 list is out now. Tap here to see the full list.
Fresh off a $1.8 million capital raise, Annie Liao is ready for her start-up, Build Club, to become the go-to training campus for anyone who wants to leverage AI. It’s a big mission, but 23-year-old Liao says there’s a definite need and market for it.
Liao fell into a data scientist role at Westpac while studying for an accounting co-op (scholarship) degree at UTS in Sydney. Despite not knowing how to code, she learned Python on the job and was quickly promoted – of course, with a lot of hard work, she says. By graduation, she’d banked up three years of full-time work experience and had a decision to make: “Do I actually want to be a data scientist?”
It turned out Liao had a bit more on her agenda. She worked as a consultant in Southeast Asia for Boston Consulting Group for a little more than a year – until a venture capital gig with Aura Ventures (a small, $30 million fund) opened up. It’s here Liao developed a passion and awareness for AI.
“It focused on pre-seed start-ups, and I mainly worked on AI investments. I did a lot of writing regarding AI agents, the future of the workforce with AI and different trends and themes,” Liao says. “Halfway through my time at Aura, we founded the first iteration of Build Club.”
Build Club was initially launched as a community for AI founders who committed to a weekly Sunday catch-up to build their start-ups. Liao’s vision was to bring the San Francisco start-up culture to Sydney.
“It then organically grew into something bigger,” she says. “Founders in Melbourne who didn’t have anything like Build Club over there volunteered to run it, so we rebranded away from Aura’s Build Club to just Build Club. It scaled crazily from there.”
As it stands, Build Club is in more than 20 cities worldwide, with volunteers running co-working days, and it’s grown to run an accelerator program for AI in partnership with Amazon Web Services (though it does not take equity from founders).
The accelerator’s first intake, which took place earlier this year, took 10 AI start-ups through a six-week program requiring them to show up and co-work together daily and share knowledge. The results were promising: one founder is now in the Y Combinator, two founders closed a pre-seed funding raise, and two entered Startmate.
“It’s great because 50% of them have made significant strides,” Liao says. But Build Club’s latest move transforms it from a community to a fully-fledged business. Liao and her team raised $1.8 million from the likes of Blackbird and Airtree to build an AI learning platform similar to Duolingo.
Build Club’s platform will be 100% free for builders, and the team will explore monetisation with enterprise sales, similar to General Assembly’s model. The product is currently in its MVP stage and being tested by users and organisations. It plans to partner with Nvidia and Grok Ventures on its launch
“My vision is to democratise AI education. We want to up-skill and re-skill as many people as possible to be able to use AI tools, whether you’re technical or non-technical.”
Look back on the week that was with hand-picked articles from Australia and around the world. Sign up to the Forbes Australia newsletter here.
Buy a copy of Forbes 30 under 30 Magazine or tap here to become a Forbes member.
