Funding Atlas is a new app from Melbourne-based entrepreneur and filmmaker David Raynor intended to make it easier for startup founders to unearth opportunities for accelerators, funding, grants, and incubators all around the world.
The 75-year-old app developer was looking for opportunities to grow his AI filmmaking platform Morphosys when David found his searches returning the same set of local incubator and accelerator programs.
“I wondered wasn’t this all together in one place so businesses around the world can search for opportunities in their own country and internationally,” he told Startup Daily.
Raynor set about vibe coding the app he wanted to see, enlisting the help of Newly AI and freelance developers to make native iOS and Android versions of Funding Atlas.
By now, we’ve all seen enough of these vibe coded apps to spot the aesthetic a mile away.
The interface is utilitarian and dense with information as it tries to give users the shortest path to the full agent-scraped database of programs and accelerators from around the world.
What Funding Atlas lacks in brand identity and UX polish, it makes up for in the fact it’s been shipped.
Raynor identified a problem and saw the development of its solution through to the end, regardless of the frustrating back-and-forth to get onto the major mobile app stores.
“I always manage to see things through,” Raynor told Startup Daily. “You can be going so fast and then find yourself having spent a lot of time and money working on a project, but you need to continue.
“That’s as true of startups as it is of anything you’re doing. If you’re moving two steps forward and one step back, you’re still moving forward. Don’t treat mistakes as failures, treat them as lessons.”
Raynor’s career is full of neat continuity. He said he started out as a hairdresser and worked on shoots for the likes of Vogue, Cosmo, and Marie Claire.
This led him to become a fashion photographer which in turn led to him writing, directing, and producing short films — a path that reached the Cannes film festival.
Filmmaking led to starting up his tech platform, Morphosys and now to Funding Atlas.
“The things I do, I do well,” he said.
Raynor is hoping his first full featured app can help fellow entrepreneurs realise their own dreams.
Even if it doesn’t recoup the token cost of LLMs crawling the web every 2 hours, at least he’s still learning into his 70s.
You can buy Funding Atlas for $39.99 on the Apple App Store and for $34.99 on Google Play.
