Voice API player Clique expands to Melbourne, Australia, with plans to invest

Ahead of our TechCrunch Battlefield Australia tomorrow, there are further signs that Australia’s tech scene is experiencing a boom. While the country’s biggest startup hub is generally acknowledged to be Sydney, its long-time rival Melbourne is fast becoming a viable choice for international tech giants to land. Already, Slack, Hired, Zendesk, GoPro, Square, and Cognizant have set up shop in the Victorian capital, and today they are joined by Clique, one of the world’s largest voice API technology companies. Today it launched its operations in Australia, with plans to invest over $10 million in the Australian market in the next five years. While its HQ will be in Melbourne it will also have an office in Sydney, supporting its expansion into the Asia Pacific region. In Melbourne it will be based out of the York Butter Factory startup hub in Melbourne.

Clique has 20 million users worldwide for its Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS), a cloud-based platform that lets customers integrate voice, messaging, video, and other communications channels into their software via simple API calls. Clique Labs, its investment and partnership arm, aims to fund promising start-ups involved in communications-related APIs.

“Australia’s successfully functioned as a test-bed for technology innovations that go on to sweep through Asia, which is why we chose it for our first market-specific launch outside of North America,” said Andy Powers, CEO and founder of Clique, in a statement. Powers will also be speaking at Startup Battlefield Australia in Sydney tomorrow.

He says the company’s venture capital arm has more than $10 million ready to invest in high-potential communications API ventures, both in Australia and throughout AsiaPac.

It’s already the lead investor in Melbourne-based startup Tagspace which is working on the “mixed-reality meeting of the future”, where you have integrated information displayed around meeting attendees, searchable meeting transcripts, and so on.