Liam Millward runs Instant, a retention-marketing platform out of Sydney that hundreds of online brands use to win back shoppers who were about to walk away. He is still in his early twenties.
Instant sits in an unglamorous corner of ecommerce. When a shopper fills a cart and leaves, or buys once and never returns, most of that lost value quietly disappears. Instant's software works to recover it - recognising visitors, rebuilding abandoned carts, and firing personalised email and SMS flows that pull people back to checkout. The pitch Millward makes is simple: the cheapest customer to grow is the one you already have. While rivals spent on ever-pricier ads to acquire new buyers, Instant went after the revenue hiding inside a brand's existing audience.
That thesis has carried the company a long way in a short time. Instant works with more than 500 brands, has driven over $56 million in incremental revenue for them, and reports annual recurring revenue climbing by more than $1 million every month. In 2025 the company announced an $18 million Series A led by Hummingbird Ventures, with continued backing from Blackbird, TEN13 and Reinventure, valuing Instant at around $100 million. Millward has said the round came together in roughly ten days.
The company he is building now
Instant started as a single tool and grew into a full retention suite - abandoned-cart recovery, visitor identification, audience building, and AI-driven email and SMS flows. Its customer list runs across fashion and consumer brands including July, Peppermayo, Fayt the Label, STAX, Ally Fashion and Toys R Us. The Series A money is aimed squarely at North America, where Instant is pushing to make its product more self-service so brands can switch it on without a long sales cycle.
Millward is unusually blunt about what matters to him: profit and speed. In an era where growth-at-all-costs became the default startup religion, he talks more like an operator watching margins than a founder chasing headlines. He has described startups as a velocity game, and framed competitors not as a threat but as motivation to keep shipping faster than anyone can copy.
"Copycats are fine because we outpace their execution. They keep us ahead of our game and ensure we continue moving quickly - as we have always done."
Liam MillwardHow he got here
Millward's path into technology did not start in a lecture hall. He launched his first business at 13, while travelling around Australia and the wider world with his family in a caravan. The road doubled as his classroom, and building things became the habit that stuck. At 16 he ran an ecommerce store that reached around $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue. He also founded Navigate Australia, a free digital travel magazine that grew to more than 50,000 readers within a year of launching.
The e-commerce store taught him where the money leaks out of an online business, and that lesson became Instant. He teamed up with William Gao, who became the company's CTO, and the pair - 17 and 19 at the time - set out to fix retention marketing. In 2022 they raised a $2.2 million pre-seed led by Blackbird, reported at the time as the largest pre-seed round Australia had seen. It was a serious bet on a founder who was not yet old enough to have finished school in the conventional way.
The early days were scrappy. Millward has spoken candidly about dodging WeWork rent at 17 before the company had the cash to do things properly - the kind of detail that undercuts any myth of a smooth, inevitable rise. What he has instead is a pattern: start before you're ready, ship quickly, and let a working product do the arguing.
"Startups are a velocity game. It's all about momentum, and Instant has very strong momentum."
Liam MillwardWhat he's chasing
Instant's stated mission is to power the world's most innovative brands by driving their revenue and retention on autopilot. In practice that means going deeper on AI - using real-time behaviour data to decide who to message, when, and with what - and pushing the product into the US at a pace that keeps the company ahead of imitators. Millward's obsession with profitability suggests he wants Instant to be durable rather than merely fast-growing, a distinction that becomes sharper the more capital flows into ecommerce software.
For a founder who started building in a caravan and raised his first venture round before he could legally sign much of the paperwork, the through-line is consistency. Navigate Australia, the teenage ecommerce store, and now Instant are all the same instinct at different scales: find where value is being lost, and go and collect it.