Australian small and medium-sized businesses lose an estimated $7 billion a year to unanswered calls, delayed responses, and missed client opportunities. Jacob Banks and Luke Kelleher built Sophiie AI to close that gap. "Business owners often tell us that missed calls translate directly into missed revenue," says Banks, co-founder and CEO. "We created Sophiie to act as a safety net — capturing every lead, handling the day-to-day admin, and giving customers a consistent, professional experience without adding to staff workload."

"If AI agents are the future of admin, Sophiie might be the dial tone they all answer to."

Built for service-based businesses like trades, legal, and professional services, Sophiie operates as a full end-to-end client management system. It answers enquiries around the clock, schedules appointments, logs job details, issues reminders, and even supports payment follow-ups — all feeding into a centralised CRM dashboard, so business owners have real-time visibility of every client touchpoint from the first call to the final invoice. It's customisable to each business's brand voice, and designed to complement teams rather than replace them, freeing staff to focus on higher-value work.

From Australia-only to a US launch

Sophiie launched publicly in August 2025 with an Australia-only revenue base. Since then, the company has hit $1.9M ARR in Australia (as of January 2026), raised $2.2M from Australian investors, launched in the US in April, and is already seeing traction outside Australia too.

From Jacob, Co-founder & CEO: "If you don't make it in the US, you don't make it anywhere — the market's just too massive to ignore. Before Embark, we were an Australia-only business. Two weeks in the program and we walked away with connections that would've taken three or four months to build on our own — going to Palo Alto, meeting SVB, sitting with people who are deeply wired into the Valley. Since then we've hit $1.9M ARR in Australia, launched in the US, raised $2.2M from Australian investors, and we're already seeing traction outside Australia too."

With Australian traction proven, US doors opened, and fresh funding in the bank, Sophiie is now betting that the same problem it solved for tradies and professional services at home — the missed call, the dropped lead — is universal enough to scale well beyond it.

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