Birchal cofounder is back with a new AI startup

Matt Vitale, cofounder of equity crowdfunding platform Birchal, has returned to startup life after a six-month recharge with a new venture, using AI in regulated sectors.

New Dialogue is an enterprise AI platform for organisations to deploy open-source large language models (LLMs) in secure environments.

Vitale and founder Tod Pedler have spun out New Dialogue from Pedler’s enterprise SaaS company, CentricMinds. It’s already live in pilots across professional services, healthcare and legal services.

Vitale describes the platform as a practical middle ground between public black-box AI services such as OpenAI and costly bespoke builds for organisations to deploy, manage and govern LLMs within their own secure environments, with full data control, transparency and speed.

“Many of the most important institutions in the country can’t (or shouldn’t) use public AI tools,” he said.

“They need sovereign, explainable infrastructure they can actually control.”

The Birchal cofounder stepped down as CEO of the crowdfunding platform he’d built and led for eight years at the startup fo 2025, citing burn out.

Vitale said he was drawn to AI by what he sees as a repeat of earlier infrastructure losses.

“We lost search to Google, and social to Meta. AI is different. Enterprise might be the last line of defence,” he said.

“There’s no shortage of enthusiasm for AI. But most large organisations are constrained by legal, compliance, and ethical concerns, particularly with black-box systems. This is where everything is bottlenecking.”

Models such as Meta’s Llama 2 or France’s Mistral can run using New Dialogue within a company’s own cloud environments and also includes governance features, CEO Tod Pedler said.

“We’ve productised what compliance-conscious organisations will need. A private, policy-aligned AI assistant,” he said.

“The differentiator is speed. We can get an organisation live in days, not quarters.”

New Dialogue’s implementation model typically begins with a 60-day pilot, where clients test AI against specific workflows and fine-tune the model using internal data.

Vitale said they’re seeing real productivity gains, not just efficiency around content creation from New Dialogue users.

“We’re embedding AI into workflows to unlock speed, quality, and better decision-making, and we’re doing it in a way that aligns with an organisation’s internal governance,” he said

The startup is also seeing interest from countries with similar policy settings to Australia, such as the UK, New Zealand, and Canada.