Aussie tech startup Curiious recently raised $1 million in funding to help it accelerate its product development, sales and power a global expansion.

Tasked with building the metaverse for business and creating rich 3D worlds and interactions, the company’s CEO Michelle Schuberg, has a lot on her plate.

Curiious believes its tech should significantly improve business outcomes through increased productivity, streamlined access to information and heightened engagement. Rich data and analytics bring customers closer to understanding their audience than ever before.

WLT sat down with Schuberg for a delightfully honest chat about being a female-led tech company and building a winning culture.

Congratulations on the new funding, what will it allow you to do that you otherwise cannot?

It’s all about growth for Curiious now – the investment will be used to expand the team so that we can keep up with the demand and the potential of the product both from a development and customer success perspective.

Why is Curiious’ technology necessary now?

Organisations globally are struggling to navigate their communication needs. They are spending a fortune on an unwieldy mix of remote and in-person channels without the ability to properly measure impact – and as users, we are becoming fatigued with the platform hopping.

Curiious gives customers a 360-degree digital home for all information and interaction across all of their audiences. Whether they’re connecting in person or online we deliver an integrated hub for meetings, events, resources and social activity. A virtual town square essentially.

By delivering all of a customer’s communication needs on one cost-effective, highly engaging and measurable platform, Curiious drives tangible value to their bottom line.

Curiious has a small team, how important has your company culture been to your growth?

Mission critical! It’s something we take very seriously – the leadership team keeps the culture conversation on the table always. In start-up land, every single person in the team has to be agile, resourceful and full of passion. You can’t demand attributes like that from a team, you can only work your butt off to create an environment that sees people want to bring those things to the table. Only this morning on our stand-up, one of the team commented that it’s a great sign we laugh together as much on a Monday morning call as we do at Friday night drinks. Hearing that made my heart smile.

Curiious works with a lot of large brands and has a variety of different use cases, where do your clients get the most value from the platform?

Irrespective of the hemisphere or use case, customers who use the platform to build ongoing relationships with their audience via regular engagement over time, really reap the rewards. One of the superpowers of the platform is letting our customers move away from a cadence of big high-touch, high-cost sugar hits, with vast periods of silence in between, to a more consistent and interactive communication style. We talk about having participants in the platform as opposed to witnesses. You can see when the lightbulb of opportunity goes off with a customer, they are going to really get the best of what we have to offer.

You have a female chief operating officer, Karen Arkell, do you find that people are surprised to have such strong female representation at the top of a small tech company?

The fact is three of the four people in our leadership team are women (Laurel Cook is chief customer officer) but I certainly didn’t set out to build a female-led business. They were just so clearly the right people for the roles.

As I was navigating the early stages of my career, gender was rarely discussed – that seems to have played out for my peers one of two ways. They either felt the bite of inequity so brutally it changed their trajectory. Or they chose to ignore it, or be fuelled by it and forged ahead. Both are instinctive responses to adversity (basic fight or flight stuff) and I wonder what more could have been achieved if that energy and resourcefulness was able to be channelled elsewhere – like into innovation.

So while I don’t actively court the commentary on gender I am really happy to spend my attention helping move the dial on diversity of all types, so that everyone can channel their energy into their chosen cause, rather than into their right to participate.

What is most exciting you in the world of tech at the moment and where are the biggest opportunities for women in the industry at the moment?

The pace of emerging tech is thrilling. Society goes decades and decades between truly revolutionary moments – I am so chuffed to be here for this particular moment in time. The opportunity for women (or anyone not currently in tech) is to bring perspective… human nature has an unfortunate history of pointing new solutions at old problems. We are creatures of habit. Technology is awesome, but without fresh thinking and nuanced perspectives helping to shape it, the dial will only move incrementally. The tech itself is only pulling one end of the elastic band, we need fresh critical thinking to pull the other end and make innovation really twang!

As a female CEO of a tech company, what is the one piece of advice that you wish you had received when you were starting out in your career?

EVERYONE IS MAKING IT UP AS THEY GO!!!!

Be brutally honest with yourself about the value you can add to a situation – then go add it!