Founded six months ago, Source is led by 18-year-old wunderkind Liam Fuller. Square Peg led the $2.1m pre-seed raise when Fuller was 17, making him the youngest founder in its portfolio. Ten13 VC and Aussie angels have written checks too.
Most 17-year-olds in Ireland are in the depths of both a frigid winter and Term 2 academics in the second month of the calendar year.
Dublin-based Liam Fuller was experiencing both of those things in 2025, while also plotting how to revolutionise retail procurement and launch a startup that can tackle a $1 trillion market gap.
“Back in February, when OpenAI and Anthropic released their new reasoning models, I had this moment where it just clicked – the progress in AI wasn’t slowing down. I knew then it was the right time to go all in,” Fuller tells Forbes Australia.
The digital native could see that the way retailers were managing procurement was stuck in the dark ages, especially when compared to the uber-efficient ordering platforms that consumers have access to, such as Amazon.
“It was obvious to me that not only did the experience of ordering suck, but knowing what to order — and when — wasn’t always clear or easy for buyers.”
Liam Fuller
“It really hit me when a retailer told me they had just three people managing hundreds of millions of euros in procurement spend across 10,000 SKUs — all through Excel and an ERP system from the early 2000s. It wasn’t uncommon for the team to work 14-hour days and still make frequent ordering mistakes — often buying too much or too little, and switching between all sorts of data to make a decision,” says Fuller.
“If AI could understand messy, unstructured data, we could build a system that not only simplifies buying for these teams, but actually helps them make better decisions — and improves itself over time,” he says.
The solution, Fuller concluded, was to utilise state-of-the-art technology to enhance efficiency. He partnered with 25-year-old Yoan Gabison, a Paris-based engineer (and now Fuller’s co-founder and CTO) who specialises in large language models. The two Zoomers got busy building QuickFind AI, which now trades as Source.
In March, Fuller had some time on his hands, having just been suspended from high school for posting on LinkedIn from the school bathroom. He booked a flight to Sydney to visit his grandparents. While in line to board the plane, he cold-emailed some Aussie investors that he thought might be interested in his startup idea.
His pre-boarding efforts resulted in a meeting with Square Peg founder Paul Bassat in Sydney, an invitation to attend an Angels 361 founder event, and ultimately, a USD$1.4 million pre-seed raise.
“When someone demonstrates this level of execution and strategic thinking at 17, the growth trajectory becomes incredibly compelling,ˮ says Bassat, whose firm led the raise. “I’ve been impressed by many young entrepreneurs, but Liam combines technical sophistication with commercial instincts that are rare at any age. “
Angel investors also participated in the pre-seed raise. Eucalyptus co-founder Charlie Gearside is on the cap table, as is former Stripe CTO David Singleton, and Faruk Ismail, the co-founder of Slice. Early Stage VC TEN13 invested, too.
“Liam is not just building another ‘AI tool’; he’s fundamentally reimagining how SMBs buy things,” TEN13 partner Brendan Hill tells Forbes Australia.
Hill received a cold LinkedIn message from Fuller, and set up a meeting for the following week in Sydney.
“I was expecting the usual combination of youthful energy and raw ambition. But within minutes of speaking with him, it was clear: this is a truly special founder and I committed to invest on the spot (something that I’ve never done in a first meeting),” says Hill.
The timing of their get-together could not have been more ideal.
“After our meeting, I invited him to a quarterly event I was running that night called ‘361 Angel Club’ which hosts 100 investors and 100 founders at a rooftop bar in Sydney. Liam arrived early, spoke to every person in attendance, and was the last to leave.”
It was there that Fuller landed checks from Gearside and Ismail. Not only do the pre-seed investors have faith in Fuller as founder, they also see immense opportunity in the sector that Quickside/Source is innovating in.
“QuickFind’s advantage is its simplicity and frictionless approach. It layers on top of a business’s existing email, ingesting unstructured data – PDFs, quotes, spreadsheets, invoices – and transforms it into a clean, 1-click ordering dashboard. Any team member can prompt it with natural language like “repeat last Monday’s order,” and QuickFind’s AI agents handle the rest,” says Hill.
“We’re not just excited by his current vision for Source; we’re excited by his ability to navigate and adapt as the business evolves,” says Bassat.
Using agentic AI to engineer solutions
Source is not Fuller’s first startup-rodeo.
He founded CartShare in July 2024, while going through the 7-week Patch accelerator in Dublin. True to its name, CartShare is a Shopify plugin that facilitates cart-sharing with an ecommerce user’s friends and family.
Patch is supported by OpenAI, the Dublin DogPatch startup hub, and Stripe, which was founded in 2010 by Irish founders John and Patrick Collison.
Fuller says Patch equipped him with a ‘move-fast’ startup mentality.
The now 18-year-old is relocating to Silicon Valley, the home of the ‘move-fast-and-break-things’ mantra, and the epicentre of the AI-revolution. There he will continue to push the mission of Source, launch US pilots of the technology, and tap into the accelerated growth that many startups are experiencing by integrating Agentic AI.
“We can take messy, scattered data, to help buying teams know what to buy, when to buy it, and even spot missed sales opportunities and allow them to buy from 100s of suppliers in a few clicks autonomously on top of their existing systems – which is nearly impossible to do when you’re managing thousands of SKUs with a tiny team.”
A ubiquitous problem that Fuller and Gabison are developing a refined solution for.
“Consumers are used to the Amazon experience – a few clicks and it’s done,” says Fuller. “We’re building that kind of experience for retail buyers.”
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