Unlike any other program in the world, our mentors invest their own money into each cohort’s Startmate Fund.

This pool includes Australia and New Zealand’s top VC firms: Blackbird, Grok, Square Peg, Rampersand, Tempus Partners, Giant Leap Fund, Skip Capital and Eleanor Ventures.

The Startmate fund then invests $120k (at your latest valuation or ~8%) in each team. Each mentor’s investment is split across all teams in the cohort.

The magic is that everyone in Startmate is incentivised to work together and provide as much value as possible to all teams in the cohort.

Your success is our success.

If you are interested in becoming a Startmate Mentor, we ask you to first join our Startmate Supporter list.

We share our Supporters list with each cohort to give them access to the knowledge that exists within our wider community.

Periodically, the Startmate team will review our Supporter list and determine whether you might make a good fit as a Startmate Mentor.

Our cycle of success relies on Startmate maintaining very high calibre mentors, so to become a Startmate Mentor you must meet one of the following criteria:

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Founder
‍Previously founded a company and led it past Series A fundraising, or bootstrapped revenue beyond $1m ARR

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Investor
Invests in 2+ early-stage start-ups each year and has invested >$500k previously

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Scaler
Previously established a business unit within a seed-stage start-up that is now valued at >$10M or lead the expansion of a startup to a new country