The company

The company behind NUVC and NUVC Family Office.

NUAI builds decision-intelligence businesses for private capital, and publishes research on how venture capital decisions are actually made.

What NUAI is

NUAI has been building AI systems in Melbourne since 2021. What it builds them for has changed twice; the standard has not.

The problem now: private capital has more discovery than it can use and less conviction than it needs. More data produces more noise, and the weight falls back onto human judgment at exactly the moment it is hardest to defend.

We build specialised businesses that close that gap. Each one starts from a distinct decision-maker — a founder raising capital, a venture capital firm assessing a deal, a family office allocating to a fund — and builds the evidence layer that decision deserves. The decision itself stays where it belongs.

AI does the homework. You make the call.

How we work

Two co-founders set direction. A network of senior advisors brings judgment we do not have in-house. An agent workforce does the building and the day-to-day operating.

That is the whole company — which is either the interesting part or the worrying part, depending on what you came here to find out.

The number we would most like to put on this page is our scoring accuracy. It is not here, because we took it down: the way it was measured flattered it. What replaces it goes on the research page when the work is done.

What NUAI does

NUAI sells nothing itself. It holds the standard each company is built to, publishes the research, and handles partnership and press. The products live on their own sites.

Company: NUAI
Founded: 2021 · Melbourne, Australia
Co-founders: Tick Jiang · Duan Tianyi
Category: Conviction infrastructure for private capital
Companies: NUVC · NUVC Family Office
Enquiries: Contact NUAI

How we got here

Five years. Two pivots. One standard.

The short version: we kept the discipline and changed everything else.

2021 Once upon a time

A company for models nobody else would build.

NUAI was founded in Melbourne to commercialise custom AI models across industries — licensing them, and investing alongside them. Tick Jiang started it with her AI and quantitative-finance teacher, a computer-vision engineer who had built Apple's wallet CV model and worked at Meta. An early-stage angel investor in China seeded it on the strength of the deck alone.

The first thing we shipped was a liveness model: telling a living face from a photograph of one, and estimating age to within about eighteen months.

2022 One day

It worked. Then it stopped.

NUAI pivoted into decentralised AI and blockchain infrastructure, advised by a leading researcher in federated learning, and drew pre-seed interest from tier-one funds.

Then Tick stepped back for personal reasons and handed the company to her co-founder in San Francisco. By the end of the year it had been given up altogether.

2023 Because of that

Forty-seven investors, one recurring answer.

Tick took the company back with the original vision intact. At the Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship, through the VC Catalyst programme, she worked with 47 Australian venture investors on how they actually decide.

The problem was not that capital lacked data. It was that capital could not see its own reasoning — no shared evidence, no visible confidence, no record of why. NUAI was rebranded to NUVC, and the target moved from models to decisions.

2024 Because of that

Six hundred companies in four hours.

Self-funded, with eight engineers and no outside capital, we built the first version alongside the angels, syndicates and VCs who would have to live with it. It screened 600 Startmate applications in four hours.

Late that year, a 16-kilometre hike in the Grampians turned into a co-founder.

2025 Because of that

223 reasons not to launch.

Weeks before going live, an external engineer audited the product and found 223 bugs and vulnerabilities. In a business whose only durable moat is reputation, that is not a punch list. It is an answer.

We did not ship. Tick let the engineering team go and rebuilt the product herself, mentored by senior engineers who had done it before. It took a year and a half.

The design was not the bottleneck — Duan had finished the second version of the founder product already. Three of those months were Tick learning to build a front end well enough to deliver it.

The rebuild did not mean sitting still. While it ran, the same two people and the same agent workforce shipped four other products end to end — different industries, one operating model, NUAI's original 2021 thesis tested sideways.

minifi.games nutruck.food crown-tools.au monol.com.au

2026 Until finally

Live, and slower than it should have been.

NUVC is live for founders. NUVC Family Office is in beta with design partners. Five years, two pivots, and eighteen months of that spent rebuilding a product that had already been built once.

How we govern this

The 223 was not luck. It was the process working.

A company that lets AI agents build its products has to be able to say what stops them shipping something wrong. Here is what does.

Machines do the work. People remain accountable for it.

An audit that finds 223 problems is only alarming if nothing was going to catch them. The reason we publish that number is that finding it, and refusing to ship until it was fixed, is the control — not the failure.

The test of that is what a company does with its best number when the number turns out to be wrong. Ours is off the site.

Nothing irreversible is automated Production data, migrations, payments, authentication, secrets and release flags are human-decided. An agent that reaches one of those stops and asks.
Scoring is reviewed for bias Assessments run through a three-layer fairness review — statistical, rule-based and independent model review — and every score decomposes into the evidence behind it. Anyone scored can contest it.
Independent review before release Consequential changes are reviewed outside the team that wrote them. That is what produced the 2025 audit, and it did not stop with it.

The shape of the company

Small by design. Not small in output.

Three numbers describe how the work actually gets done here.

2 Co-founders

Direction, product and technical judgment, and the taste calls. Not delegated.

Advisors Senior human network

Domain judgment from people who have done the thing, where experience cannot be substituted.

96 AI agents

A specialised agent workforce that builds the products and runs the operations, under human direction and human accountability.

Two people is a fair thing to worry about.

A company this small, holding this kind of data, invites an obvious question: what happens if one of us stops?

The answer is not a bench of names we do not have. It is that the method is written down and executed rather than carried in anyone's head — how work gets reviewed, what an agent may never do alone, what has to be checked before anything ships. All of it is explicit, versioned, and runs the same way whoever is directing it.

Whoever operates this next inherits a method, not a blank page. If that is not enough assurance for your mandate, ask — we will tell you where the gaps are.

Ownership

Founder-built. Founder-owned.

Every line of it originated here, and none of it is encumbered.

The IP is ours, without an asterisk.

NUVC is independently developed, pre-existing intellectual property owned by NUAI. It was not commissioned by, developed for, or assigned to any client or employer, and it is not derived from or co-mingled with any third-party codebase, dataset or confidential information.

Where NUAI takes on outside engagements, NUVC is expressly carved out of the work-product assignment. That carve-out is documented, not assumed.

Registered mark The NUVC device mark is a registered trade mark of NUAI in Australia (IP Australia).
Product marks NUVC, NuScore and NUVC Family Office are trade marks of NUAI.
Methodology The scoring and screening methodology behind the products is our own — developed in-house, and validated against our own record rather than a licensed model.
Unencumbered No third-party assignment, no client entanglement, no shared ownership.

Co-founders

Two people. One standard.

Direction, judgment and taste stay human. Everything that can be systematised is.

The partnership started 16 kilometres into the Grampians.

Late 2024. It is a long, unkind hike, and there is not much to do out there but talk. Duan had just wound up SocialMediaUp: an investor had agreed to put in five million dollars, an email went unanswered, and by the time anyone noticed the round was gone and the company with it.

It is an expensive way to learn that a decision is not the same as an outcome — that the distance between yes and done is where companies actually die.

Tick was rebuilding a company about exactly that distance. They came off the mountain as co-founders, on one condition: only build things worth the trouble.

Co-founder · CEO & CTO

Tick Jiang

Melbourne-based, CQF-certified, and still the one who signs off on the architecture and the scoring methodology. Sets product and technical direction. Writes about building and operating agentic companies in first person, on a personal site.

tickjiang.com

Co-founder · Creative Director

Duan Tianyi

A brand specialist across China and Australia, with prior founder experience. Designed the second version of the NUVC founder product, and the identities NUVC and NUAI both use today — including the marks at the top of this page.

Common questions

The five we are actually asked.

Short answers, in case you came here to check one specific thing.

What is NUAI?

NUAI is the company behind NUVC and NUVC Family Office. It builds decision-intelligence businesses for private capital and publishes research on how venture capital decisions are actually made. It was founded in Melbourne in 2021.

What does NUAI sell?

Nothing directly. NUVC is venture decision intelligence for founders and venture capital firms. NUVC Family Office is investment intelligence for family offices allocating to venture capital. Both live on their own sites.

Who runs NUAI?

Two co-founders — Tick Jiang, CEO and CTO, and Duan Tianyi, Creative Director — supported by a network of senior advisors and an agent workforce that does the building and the day-to-day operating.

Who owns the intellectual property behind NUVC?

NUAI does. NUVC is independently developed, pre-existing intellectual property. It was not commissioned by, developed for, or assigned to any client or employer, and the NUVC device mark is a registered trade mark in Australia.

Does NUAI publish an accuracy figure for its scoring?

Not at present. The previously published figure was withdrawn because the way it was measured flattered the result. A restated figure will appear on the research page when that work is finished.

The short version took five years. The long one is written elsewhere.

This page states the company facts. The first-person account — why the agentic model, what it took to build, and what it is like to run a company this way — is Tick's own, told first-hand.

See our research Read tickjiang.com