What began as a university side hustle for Nicholas Sanderson has grown into a platform used by thousands of allied health professionals. Now, with $46 million in fresh capital, splose is helping practitioners ditch outdated systems and reclaim time for patient care.
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Less than a decade ago, Nicholas Sanderson was a university student working as a cashier at Woolworths.
In his spare time, he began building side projects, experimenting with ways technology could simplify how businesses operated.
“I’ve always loved the internet and the idea of building things,” Sanderson says. “I loved the hustle – delivering something to someone and seeing the joy it created.”
Those early experiments would eventually lead to splose, an Adelaide-based software company that, earlier this year, closed a $46 million Series A capital round, marking the largest Series A ever raised by a software-as-a-service company in South Australian history.
It represents a sharp jump from the company’s $5 million raise in 2024. Still, the business’s premise remains simple: helping allied health professionals spend less time on administration and more time with patients.
“The core problem we’re trying to solve is removing the administrative burden from practitioners’ day-to-day work,” Sanderson says. “If we can help them run their businesses more efficiently, they can focus on delivering patient care.”
If we can help them run their businesses more efficiently, they can focus on delivering patient care.”
Practice management software itself isn’t new. But, Sanderson argues that much of what allied health professionals have relied on was built for a different era.
Before splose, many clinics relied on systems that were “literally built decades ago,” he says, often layering newer, siloed tools for notetaking, transcription, accounting and client onboarding to fill the gaps. In a crowded market of legacy practice management providers and newer single-point solutions, the result was a patchwork of disconnected systems and duplicated administration.
splose replaces that with an end-to-end platform that manages the entire workflow.
“Our platform handles everything from intake to invoice, and everything in between – how practitioners onboard and schedule new clients, support them through care delivery and ultimately get paid.”
More recently, the company introduced splose AI, embedding artificial intelligence across those workflows.
“We’ve added things like AI scribes that can convert conversations into draft progress notes,” Sanderson says. “It means practitioners can be present with their clients instead of sitting there typing away during a consultation.”
Today, splose supports more than 25,000 allied health professionals across Australia, New Zealand and, more recently, the United Kingdom, with revenue growing at more than 100% year-on-year.
But for Sanderson, building one of Australia’s fastest-growing software companies was never part of the plan.
In the early days of splose, Sanderson was teaching himself website development as a side hustle to make ends meet.
“I was in university, working at Woolworths on the side and teaching myself website development,” he says. “Back then, there weren’t tools like Squarespace or AI builders, so a lot of non-technical businesses needed help figuring out how to get visibility on the web.”
Through early investors and referrals, many of those clients worked in allied health.
Building websites for practitioners gave Sanderson an unexpected window into how those businesses operated and the challenges they faced running their practices.
“Pretty quickly, the conversation moved beyond websites,” he says. “They’d start asking how they should onboard clients, manage bookings or handle invoicing. The same issues kept coming up about the systems they were using.”
Hearing the same frustrations again and again planted the seed for something bigger. Sanderson quickly hired an engineer and began building a minimum viable product to solve a handful of those problems.
Development was largely funded through his website work, with Sanderson continuing to bootstrap the company while finishing university. “Anything that came in from the website business just went straight back into building the software,” he says.
Even so, the margins were often thin.
There were times when I got down to about $33 in the bank account. The website work was very much client-to-client, as that kind of business is, so it was a challenging time.”
The turning point came when splose secured PhysioXtra as a client through a connection with an early investor, introducing the platform to a practice with more than 100 staff.
“It was a real vote of confidence,” Sanderson says. “If a practice of that size hadn’t found a solution in the market, it showed the problem was worth solving.”
With that validation, adoption spread, with much of the company’s early growth occurring organically.
“Allied health professionals are very community-based. Once a practice had a good experience with the platform, they’d go and tell five colleagues. Word spreads quickly.”
As the user base steadily expanded, investor interest soon followed. In 2021, splose raised its first significant external funding round, securing $1 million from local investors and angels.
For Sanderson, the investment brought more than just capital. “It was the first time it felt like a real company and not something we were just running out of a side office,” he says.
Each new investor, he adds, pushed the company to operate at a higher level. “It creates a new baseline for how the business operates. You bring on new expertise that becomes the new standard, and you grow into it.”
The company’s recent $46 million Series A round marks the latest step in that progression. While the partnership with Spectrum Equity, the lead investor in the round, is still in its early stages, Sanderson says the firm’s experience is already shaping how the business thinks about its next phase.
“They’ve invested in more than 180 companies, many doing over $100 million in annual recurring revenue. They’ve seen what success at scale looks like, so the level of analysis they bring – the reporting, the market insights, the way they can dissect the business and turn that into strategy – is something we didn’t have before.”
Spectrum Equity managing director Matt Neidlinger says that experience will now help guide splose through its next phase of growth.
“We’re excited to partner with Nick and the team, supporting splose’s continued product innovation and expansion – in Australia, the UK, and beyond.”
Sanderson says the focus remains on deepening the platform’s capabilities for allied health practitioners.
He remains tight-lipped on specific timelines or future markets. Still, he says splose will continue to build out its presence in the United Kingdom, where the sector remains even more reliant on legacy systems than in Australia.
For Sanderson, however, the company’s rapid growth hasn’t changed the mindset that drove him in the early days.
“I’ve never really seen it as a burden,” he says. “When you’re building something you believe in, it doesn’t feel like work. Even today, I still feel like we’re only 1% of the journey of where we can be.”
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