‍

❤️♾️ Boundless Belief

‍At Startmate, we’re all about believing in people before they believe in themselves, right at the beginning.

BUT why believe before you are successful and never again?

I’m extremely excited to announce the

💸 CONTINUITY FUND First Close at $7m 💸

To put that into perspective: Startmate is a micro-fund, it took us 10 years to raise the first $7m at Startmate (2011 - SYD20 cohorts). The whole SM community rallied behind the fund with ~40% directly coming from the community - First Believers, mentors, alumni 🫶

Accelerator/Small Bets Fund Founders - what does this mean for you?
‍We will ALWAYS take our full pro-rata up to 5% of the total fund size cumulatively (atm $350k) in your future equity rounds! (not SAFE)

This gives you all a competitive advantage- you can go into your next fundraise knowing that Startmate always has your back
#boundlessbelief ❤️♾️

The Continuity fund is the belief that YOU are the founders that will shape the world and that more are just about to join us !

‍Startmate is there with you, shoulder to shoulder, through the entire journey.

- From dipping your toes into startups through our Women, Student, Athlete, etc Fellowships…
- To getting better at your craft through our Product, Customer Success, No-Code, etc Fellowships…
- To getting you started and validating a problem through our Launch Club.
- To being your first investor through our First Believers and the $25k Small Bets Fund.
- To accelerating your journey to your first dozen, hundred or thousands of customers through our Accelerator.
- And, the final piece of the puzzle, backing you forever after always investing our pro-rata through the Continuity Fund.

We’re alongside our founders, even before they know they want to be founders, at every stage of their journey.

A fully integrated micro-fund.

It is truly a historic moment for founders, future founders, our community and the outsized impact this will have in years to come on Australia and New Zealand.

What's on?

Ask

Accelerator Winter23 Applications are open - HERE - due in 3 weeks! (22 March)

• Our best companies each cohort come from our Community.
• Please send this to the one most ambitious founder you know!
• If you highly rate a founder - please introduce me directly (!!)

Good

• Demo Day was unreal. 100 investors at our pre-event and 800 Startmates with 100+ waiting list at our first Demo Day in Sydney in almost 4 years.
• And just like that the Summer'23 Accelerator has officially wrapped up and the incredible founders in our cohort have graduated to become our latest group of alumni. These founders are going to go on to do epic things in the coming years 🚀

• We welcomed our newest Startmate, Kaya Moore! Kaya joins as Project & Community Manager, where she’ll be launching and building new partner-run Fellowship programs. After spending the week with the team in Sydney for Demo Day, Kaya is already a much loved member of the team.
• A cracking cohort of 53 First Believers have just completed week 4 of the program, tackling portfolio allocation, legal docs, and startup selection and are raring to roll up their sleeves and start backing and believing in the next generation of great founders.
• We kicked off our inaugural Climate Tech Fellowship this week with 106 ambitious Fellows and 30 expert Advisors supporting them. Over the program Fellows will get the unique opportunity to learn from leaders in Climate Tech across ANZ and be blasted out the other side of the program blinking in the blinding light of a million ideas for how we can change the world, and surrounded by the people who will make it happen. That’s pretty special!
• Launch Club has kicked off with 65 hungry early-stage founders across Australia and New Zealand looking to make their next big leap on their startup journey. A few highlights have been meeting potential co-founders through the StartDate series and learning from some of the best including Ajay Prakash, Lucy Wark & Zak Islam.
• Continuity Fund First Close at $7m - It’s official. We’re going to be continuing to invest in our best Startmate alumni for their journeys beyond the Accelerator. We have had a first close that makes this our biggest fund in Startmates history >> and already larger than the first decade of funds combined. We’re excited to continue raising until the final close in 12 months. Doubling down on the unique opportunity to continue investing in the best companies.
• Tattarang continue to champion and support our Women Fellows, offering 20 Tattarang Scholarship positions for free participation for our upcoming Autumn23 Women Fellowship cohort!

Bad

• Continuity Fund hustle - late nights from the team pulling this all together. It’s a new fund, so there were a lot of hours put in to launch it. But the thing that got the team at every point was the excitement knowing how much impact this will have on our founders and the investors.
• Need more marketing support - if you’re getting this email, you are in the Startmate bubble = family 🫶 BUT to truly make an impact on ANZ we need to bring in new ambition into startups. We need to be reaching people outside our bubble and frankly, we don’t currently do enough here.

Ugly

• Demo day on a Wednesday - wow the Demo Day energy was off the charts, but also wow it was hard to get up the next morning. Wednesday night Demo Day meant a veryyyy tired SM team for the rest of the week 😅

Thanks, team!