We unleash the potential of Aussies and Kiwis leading the charge to a better future. We are their first believers.
Startmate Track Record vs Global Top Quartile
(Cambridge Associates) as at 30 June, 2024
TVPI = Total Value To Paid In and is a measure of
NET multiple of invested capital
And then our companies go on to be A LOT more valuable...
🍯 Startmate Doesn't Just Search for the Best Founders; We Create Them
We're connected with Founders from the very beginning—even before day one. Our programs unlock potential. They are the place where ideas collide, momentum builds, relationships flourish and Co-Founders are connected. People who had never dreamt of founding a startup, are inspired and go on to launch some of the most promising early-stage startups, with Startmate being their first investor.
Some recent highlights:
Lyrebird Health
Kai and Linus met in the Startmate Student Fellowship
Startmate invested via the Accelerator at a $1.5m valuation
And they crossed $1.5m ARR within 9 months 🚀
Aquila
Billy and Nelson met in the Startmate Engineering Fellowship
Startmate invested via the Accelerator at a $1.5m valuation
Grew 16x in less than 2 years 🚀
🍯 Thousands of Founders Apply to Startmate Every Year
At Startmate, our proven track record doesn't just attract investors—it attracts the best founders. Our alumni don’t just inspire the next generation of great founders, they mentor them too. Founders know that launching with Startmate significantly increases their chance of success.
🍯 Every ANZ Founder is 1-Step Away From Startmate Nation
Startmate Nation: a community that spans every state and territory of Australia and New Zealand, comprising over 3,500+ world-leading founders, operators and investors. Our people are connected with ANZ’s next best founders: and so we are too. For example, in our most recent cohort, 23% of all applications came as warm referrals from within our community.
🔥 Grounded in 13 Years of Success
With over 250 investments in early-stage founders and insights from 15,000 applications, we've developed a rich dataset encompassing 75,000 investment decisions. This has enabled us to analyse the thinking behind our best investments and our biggest misses. Our 12-week Accelerator provides a compressed feedback loop, revealing what drives the best outcomes. As a result, our investment framework has been continuously strengthened.
You can watch the briefing session here to learn about our investment framework, process, and custom-built Selector Portal. You can also view the slides here.
🔥 Proprietary Insight on Founders & The Problems They’re Solving
We’re not just unearthing Founders at the beginning; we’re launching them. Our pre-Accelerator programs enable us to gain deep insights over several months before we invest. This approach allows us to draw lines, not dots, identifying the most driven individuals as they take their first steps as Founders.Our Founder programs provide us with close proximity to Founders as they build. We get a front-row seat to their ability to make rapid progress, allowing us to build a comprehensive understanding of their problems and customer insights as they develop them.
🔥 Community-Enabled Decisions Build Conviction
As an industry-agnostic Fund, we need to quickly understand the current state of various customer groups and their problems. To do this, we rely on the expertise within our community—founders, operators, and investors with intimate experience in these areas. These are the same people who can help propel our investments to success during the Accelerator program. Unlike typical VC Funds, we can scale our ability to make thousands of investment decisions by leveraging both our community and our custom-built software, all underpinned by the Startmate Investment Framework.
🚀 World Class Mentors with Skin in the Game
Our mentors invest their own money in the Fund that directly invests in each cohort. This means they are fully committed to seeing our Founders succeed, going above and beyond to help them. Each Founder has a dedicated team of mentors who are deeply connected to the problem they’re solving.
🚀 Founders Need Other Founders
Being a founder can be incredibly lonely. At Startmate, the most powerful thing that happens is Founders working alongside other most ambitious Founders. These peer relationships become crucial to their journey and success. At Startmate we have the highest density of Founders in one place.
🚀 Stand on the Shoulders of the Best Startup Community in ANZ
We’ve curated a community of 3,500+ of ANZ’s best founders, operators and investors. We plug our Founders into the very centre of this universe, giving them a significant advantage. They get the first pick of the best fresh talent through our Fellowships and warm introductions to any VC, angel investor, or mentor they need.
💰 Smaller Funds, Superior Returns
We have an unfair advantage. We’re not trying to return a billion-dollar Fund three times over for Superannuation LPs. We aim to return a $3 million fund 10 times over for single investors / Family Offices LPs. And we've got the track record to prove it.
💰 The Reward of Being a First Believer: Standard Startmate Terms
We often invest pre-revenue and sometimes even pre-product, earning not just a front-row seat from the beginning but also meaningful investment terms. Our terms are upfront and transparent, with no negotiation needed. For companies that haven't previously raised a round, we invest $120K at a $1.5m post-money valuation. While other investors are entering at $25m pre-seed valuations, one of our investments reaching that outcome alone could already return the fund multiple times over. Naturally, we’re after bigger outcomes, and thus the potential return multiple will be meaningfully higher too.
💰 World Class Returns, Earlier
We are dedicated to returning capital to our investors. By deploying our Investment Strategy, we can drive substantial distributions through secondaries at Series B and beyond.
Here are a few recent examples:
8.95x DPI - Selling 100% of our shares in HappyCo Series B
3.40x DPI - Selling 60% of our shares in Bugcrowd Series E
2.61x DPI - Selling 20% of our shares in Edrolo Series B
DPI = Total distributions paid out by the Fund to the investors, net paid fees and expenses, divided by paid-in capital (Fund Size).
"I can comfortably say that Propeller wouldn't be here and our team and business wouldn't have grown without the slingshot that Startmate provided us"
"Every Founder dreams of getting into Startmate. It’s the pinnacle in ANZ. The Accelerator changed everything for us as a company. It helped us get into rooms of customers we couldn’t even dream of because of the network you get plugged into"
"Going through the Startmate program was a huge help, speeding things up for the startup by about a year. Since that first cheque from Startmate we’ve raised over $200M"
"Startmate was incredible for us. We loved every minute and wish we could go through it again. All the people we met are still on our speed dial giving amazing advice at every step of the way"
"We wouldn’t have achieved any of our current success without Startmate. The Accelerator stretched our expectations of what's possible of ourselves as Founders and our company in a short period of time"
