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Gold Coast-based Zeligate has closed a final $750,000, bringing its total seed funding to $6.25 million, and has opened a Series A round.

An earlier tranche of that funding drew the first Australian investment ever made by US-Japan venture firm DNX Ventures. The Series A will fund the commercial team and expansion into the US.

Enterprise appetite for agentic artificial intelligence (AI), meaning systems that carry out multi-step work rather than answer questions, is running well ahead of the number of projects that make it out of skunkworks and into production. In regulated industries the gap is widest. Those buyers have the most to gain and the least tolerance for a system that cannot show its working.

Zeligate built for that gap deliberately.

"In the era of vibe coding, everyone can demo," Naidoo says. "Almost nobody can survive a hospital's procurement process. We spent three years building for the second one, because that is the part competitors cannot copy in a sprint."

Zeli, the company's first AI co-worker, takes a complete job function rather than a task. She writes and posts the advertisement, sources candidates around the clock, screens every application against the role's criteria, runs first interviews by voice, video and chat, verifies credentials and work rights, completes reference checks by phone, and hands the hiring manager a ranked shortlist with the reasoning attached to every name. Every stage is recorded, transcribed and scored, which means the output is an audit trail rather than a recommendation.

Most organisations take 45 to 60 days to fill a role and run five to ten disconnected tools to do it. Zeli replaces the stack.

Zeli is in production with paying enterprise customers in aviation and government-regulated healthcare, with further deployments in higher education and other regulated sectors going live over the coming months. The company has not yet named the organisations. Public announcements are expected shortly.

Each deployment has come through vendor risk assessment, AI impact assessment, data residency review and government information technology contracting. Zeligate runs entirely on data-sovereign infrastructure, which in these sectors is not a feature but a condition of entry.

"The security questionnaire is the product," says Tom Dickie, who joined Zeligate's leadership group in a senior commercial role. "Buyers in these industries have all been burned by something that looked great in a room and never made it to production. The vendor who clears governance first wins the category, and it is not close."

Zeligate integrates with more than fifty applicant tracking systems, including Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle, iCIMS, Greenhouse and Bullhorn, and is listed on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, which lets enterprise buyers procure Zeli against committed cloud spend they have already approved.

For a company of its size, that combination removes two of the slowest steps in enterprise software: replacing the system of record, and opening a new procurement route.

Zeligate's model is land and expand. Hiring is the first job a customer gives Zeli, but the same underlying platform, the Zeli Artificial Reality Engine (ZARE), is configured for new roles without a new build. A second co-worker product is already in development for a different industry, and customer support, sales and marketing co-workers follow on the roadmap.

"The question is not who wins recruitment," Naidoo says. "It is which platform an organisation trusts enough to keep giving jobs to. The first role takes nine months of procurement. The second one takes a phone call. That is the whole business."

Co-founder Sam Naidoo, the company's head of people and culture and a trained organisational psychologist, says the design constraint has been trust rather than throughput.

"Candidates stopped hearing back and hiring managers stopped believing the shortlist," she says. "If AI only makes the silence faster, it has failed. Every applicant gets an interview and an answer. Every hiring manager can see why a name is on the list. That is not a feature we added. It is the reason the thing works."

Adam Crouch joined the board in January. The former chief executive of Redbubble, Crouch was previously general manager, international at Poshmark and held ecommerce leadership roles at Volvo Cars and Walgreens, with much of his career spent in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Dickie spent most of his career in the US before relocating to the Gold Coast, and will lead Zeligate's US entry. He is taking prospective customers in healthcare, government and aviation through procurement, security and governance review.

The Series A is open now and will fund the commercial team and the expansion into the US. Naidoo says the company is raising while its Australian regulated deployments move into production.

"Australian enterprise buyers are among the most demanding in the world on governance," he says. "Clearing them here means we arrive in the US with references instead of a deck. The seed proved the co-worker works. The Series A is about how fast we can put her in front of everyone who needs her."

Naidoo is in the US from early October and is meeting investors while there.

Zeligate is based at Cohort Innovation Space in the Gold Coast Health and Knowledge Precinct, having relocated from Brisbane in 2025.