The Meliora Company, founded by media and technology executive Clive Dickens, has announced fresh investments in five generative AI startups across the UK, Ireland, France and Australia.
The investments were made through Meliora Ventures, the firm’s dedicated investment arm.
According to Dickens, the company is deliberately focused on early-stage AI ventures with real-world utility.
“The businesses that we’ve invested are businesses that are tapping into the LLM’s (Large Language Models), using all of that, what’s called ‘tokenisation of the foundation model’, to actually solve complex business models.
“The reason we’re doing that is because when we launched three weeks ago, we said that we were an AI-first and AI-experience advisory business, we had more experience than the other top 10 global businesses in our sector, and this is proof of that,” he told Mediaweek.
The real innovation is Gen AI
When describing the technology, Dickens drew comparisons to another big (and as yet unknown at the time) advancement: the internet.
“Go back to the ’90s when the web was new. People would tell businesses they needed a website, and everyone asked, ‘What’s a website?’ And of course, 40 years later, everyone knows what a website is.
“Then, in 2007, you needed a mobile app on your smartphone. Everyone said, What’s an app? And now we use mobile apps multiple times each day,” he said.
Today, he continued, while most people have experimented with ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, the real innovation lies not in the models themselves, but in the application layer. That’s Gen AI.
Dickens, however, believes many businesses still haven’t grasped how to practically engage with the technology.
“Having worked in some of those businesses, the frustration is that people don’t know that AI is transformative,” he said. “They know it’s ‘Industrial Revolution-type’’impact, but they’re not sure how to deploy.”
While some organisations are experimenting, “people have organised hackathons or created siloed teams to engage staff and help them understand the technology”, Dickens sees a disconnect between those internal efforts and meaningful implementation.
He continued: “People don’t build their own billing software or their own email software, and so forth. People think that they can build this in-house, and history indicates that the TMT businesses don’t have a great record of innovating in-house, so we try to politely point out ways that can accelerate their growth or improve their efficiency by deploying AI.”
Clive Dickens, The Meliora Company
Investment with immediate utility
The five new additions to the portfolio span sectors including media, telco, entertainment, and digital commerce. All are already delivering commercial products, with several focused on brand-safe generative content and enterprise-grade AI agents.
Two of Meliora’s early portfolio companies highlight the firm’s focus on building practical, working applications of generative AI, particularly in areas that are often overlooked.
“If you take one of the companies, Quickfind AI, they do procurement for small and medium-sized businesses,” Dickens said. “Procurement is often a relatively dry topic. Still, it is also an incredibly important topic because it can benefit from AI.”
Dickens also points to Fluency AI, a Melbourne-based compliance platform that addresses the often time-consuming process of soft standard operating procedure (SOP) logging.
“Their platform is used for what’s known as soft standard operating procedure logging, a topic that can also be quite dry.
“Still, every corporate enterprise has to do a SOT plan, and it takes days and days, sometimes even months in these big telcos or media to do it. But the Fluency AI team streamlines this process by using AI,” he said.
Going beyond capital
Meliora Ventures provides more than just financial backing to its portfolio companies.
The firm supports founders with technical guidance, product strategy and commercial introductions designed to accelerate business growth.
With team members based across APAC, EMEA and the Americas, Meliora positions itself as a link between emerging startups and established enterprise.
“We have no shortage of experience scaling technology businesses,” said Dickens. “Where we can make a real difference is getting these startups from working product to working business.”
Backing the next generation
Meliora has also partnered with NextGen Ventures, Australia’s first student-led venture capital fund, to support startups founded at the university level.
NextGen has already raised $2 million of its $2.5 million target and aims to fund youth-led ventures nationwide.
“We want to support the next generation of founders, not just those with decades of experience,” said Dickens. “There’s talent coming through Australian universities with bold ideas, and we’re excited to help them bring those to life.”
The Meliora Company
Hope springs eternal
For Dickens, optimism is fundamental.
“This is not something to be scared of,” he said. “One of our key things at Meliora is what we call ‘relentless optimism’. We have decided that our business, which is to operate in the link between human intelligence and artificial intelligence and figure out ways where AI can enhance the human experience and not replace it, makes us relentlessly optimistic about AI.”
For those companies unsure where to begin, Dickens offered this: “Businesses need to think about how they deploy those applications to allow them to grow their business, or help it to become more efficient.
“It’s about understanding the application layer and looking and scouting for these incredible teams that are doing amazing things, and then actually deploying one or more of those into your workflows, so you can then free up time to invest in people and culture and marketing,” he said.
The latest startups backed by Meliora Ventures include:
Relevance AI (Sydney) – Offers no-code vector-based workflows, empowering non-technical teams to deploy advanced AI productivity tools, such as customer feedback analysis, automated tagging, and intelligent search.
Quickfind AI (Dublin – Paris) – Delivers intelligent procurement support for SMBs through conversational AI that simplifies complex purchasing decisions.
Alludium AI (London – Dublin) – Builds enterprise-grade infrastructure for LLM-based agents that help businesses to automate workflows, enhance decision-making, and improve operational efficiency.
Fluency AI (Melbourne via NextGen Ventures) – Creates and converts fragmented SOPs into generative workflows, helping enterprise teams reduce compliance risk and scale operational efficiency.
Blunge AI (Brisbane via NextGen Ventures) – Enables brand-safe, AI-generated visual content for creative teams, media companies and marketers.
Main image: Clive Dickens