Sydney startup Paperbark lands Unilever after two pivots, six-month runway burn
Paperbark signed Unilever brands Onnit and Olly in August 2026 after killing two products and burning through half its 12-month runway. The Sydney ecommerce data startup now tracks customer journeys after ad conversion, a gap costing consumer brands millions in lost revenue.
Co-founders Bryce Antoine (CEO) and Eli Simic launched in August 2025 with an influencer-matching product. Six months later, after raising $120k, they killed it. The pilot brands gave false positives: they used the free product but would not pay.
Pivot two came in March 2026: a generalised AI agent for ecommerce. Seven brands signed on, one converted to contract. Then Antoine and Simic realised they were building a services business, not a product. By June, six months into runway, they had to nail the problem or shut down.
One hundred meetings across 48 brands followed. The signal came from Kellie Bailey, head of ecommerce at Onnit (Unilever-owned wellness brand): "I don't know what our customer's journey looks like after the ad converts."
That is the revenue leak. Brands spend millions on ads, track click-throughs, then lose visibility. Paperbark now shows what happens between click and purchase: where customers drop off, what drives conversion, how the funnel actually performs.
In August, Paperbark passed Unilever's security review and signed both Onnit and Olly. Antoine previously worked at Blackbird-backed Instant, where he saw the same gap across five years in ecommerce martech.
What this means for sales teams
For B2B ecommerce sales, customer data platforms usually sit in martech or analytics. Paperbark is positioning as a sales enablement tool: exposing revenue leakage, quantifying conversion gaps, giving AEs specific numbers to close deals.
The Unilever win matters because enterprise consumer brands have long sales cycles and procurement hurdles. Landing even a subset of a global portfolio (Unilever operates in 190 countries across hundreds of brands) is a strong proof point for selling into similar accounts.
Paperbark sits at roughly 11-50 employees and under $5M revenue. No visible CRO or VP Sales yet, just Antoine as CEO. That is typical for early-stage product-first startups, but worth watching: enterprise deals usually need dedicated sales leadership to scale.
The company may still be bootstrapped or privately held. No disclosed funding rounds beyond the initial $120k. If they are building enterprise traction on seed capital, that runway discipline matters.
The lesson
Two pivots in seven months, half the runway burned. The product that worked came from 100 customer meetings, not the founders' original vision. Antoine and Simic killed what was not working and rebuilt around a specific pain point: the post-click revenue gap.
For sales professionals evaluating early-stage vendors or roles, that matters. Startups that survive multiple pivots and land enterprise logos before running out of cash tend to have figured out the problem-solution fit. The question now is whether Paperbark can replicate the Unilever win across other consumer brands without building a services layer.