The founders in Startmate’s Winter21 cohort of 19 startups make their plays for money and mentors this week at Demo Day.
The winter crop of Australian (13) and New Zealand (6) ventures is Startmate’s largest ever cohort and agtech, gaming, fintech and climate tech.
They’ve just emerged from the 12-week program with capital from Startmate – $75,000 for a 7.5% on a $1 million valuation for startups taking on a round for the first time, the same figure at the previous round valuation for those that already have.
And now it’s up to those entrepreneurs to present to a global audience of founders, mentors and investors this Thursday, October 7, at 5pm for Demo Day
Startmate principal Lauren Capelin says the Winter21 cohort companies are working at the frontier of industries including energy storage, mental health, the creator economy, cyber security and the gaming metaverse.
“We are inspired by the constantly increasing ambition of founders across the region and can’t wait to see what this cohort achieves by Demo Day,” she said
The Winter21 cohort also included a climate accelerator stream made up of agtech AI startup Agtuary, personal care startup baresop, Storage-as-a-Service solution EnergyBank Limited, robotics startup Ripe Robotics, and renewable energy storage startup Vertus Energy Limited. That stream is backed by Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes through his family investment firm, Grok Ventures, with a focus on launching the next wave of startups working on innovative technologies to tackle carbon reduction.
EnergyBank, co-founded by Tim Hawkey, offers a solution for electricity companies allowing renewable energy to compete with, and displace, fossil fuel generation.
“We have designed our technology to be capable of economically enabling the full decarbonisation of electricity grids in Australia and beyond. Being part of the Startmate Winter21 cohort means we can problem-solve with the best brains in the industry to reach our goals, faster,” Hawkey said.
Another member of the Winter21 Cohort, baresop, is tackling the single-use plastic packaging.
Founder Prisca Ongonga-Daehn said Startmate’s mentors helped her scale baresop’s subscription consumer model.
“Traditional hand and body soap products are 90% water, and 10% active ingredients,” she said.
“All that water means so much unnecessary packaging. I am on a mission to change that, and I’m really excited to have access to the best e-commerce minds in the region through Startmate to supercharge the tangible positive impact I want to make.”
Register to watch the Startmate Demo Day here.
Here is the W21 cohort pitching on Thursday night:
Agtuary (AU) | Agtuary is an AI company that analyses agricultural land to inform lending, risk and investment decision-making in agriculture.
Agtuary fills an important gap for investors, lenders, insurers and farmers by providing standardised data sets and workflow tools enabling faster collaboration to unlock billions currently lost to poor information and manual processes. Agtuary’s AI and Machine Learning uses globally accessible satellite weather and climate data to analyse agricultural land to provide a deep understanding of risk and pricing across climate, production and operations to ensure level access and efficiency in financing and improved food security. Founders: Angus Muffatti and Matthew Rozek.
baresop (AU) | baresop is a nature-based, concentrated powder that turns into foam for hand, body and hair wash products.
baresop eliminates the water used in traditional products that makes it necessary to use single-use plastic packaging. Traditional hand and body soap products are 90% water, and 10% active ingredients, adding CO2 to the atmosphere by shipping and storing water and plastic around the world. baresop’s powder-to-foam hand and body/hair wash zero waste products are Australian made with plant-derived ingredients and packaged in recycled waste that’s either recyclable or home compostable. Founder: Prisca Ongonga-Daehn.
chnnl (NZ) | chnnl is a workplace psychological safety platform for employers and employees alike, which uses AI and data insights to create transformational change.
chnnl’s unique algorithm and data analysis methods allow early identification of potential problems, negative trends, bullying and burnout, while positive trends can be capitalised on and celebrated. The platform aims to drive employee retention, productivity and positive culture by empowering leadership to listen, understand and act on issues as they arise. Founders: Liz Berryman and Josh Carter.
CipherStash (AU) | Cipherstash is a searchable, encrypted data-storage platform that simplifies the secure management of personally Identifiable Information for application developers. Unlike existing solutions, CipherStash simplifies compliance by ensuring sensitive data is always encrypted but easily accessible by authorised users. CipherStash also provides developers with anonymised data sets that more closely resemble live systems thus shortening development and testing timeframes. Founder: Dan Draper
EnergyBank Limited (NZ) | EnergyBank is a Storage-as-a-Service solution for electricity companies allowing renewable energy to compete with, and displace, fossil fuel generation. Decarbonisation of the electricity system is stymied by the inability to balance generation and demand. EnergyBank’s long-duration energy storage technology uses weights suspended below a large buoy floating on the ocean’s surface, storing energy by raising the weights, and releasing energy by lowering them. Founders: Tim Hawkey, Jordan Hooper, Aaron Johnson and Rhys Foster.
Flow Payments (AU) | Flow is an instant-payments platform solving late payments for the world’s 1 billion creators, freelancers and small businesses. Creatives are paid within seconds of completing a gig or project, whilst concurrently automating business repayments over instalments to better suit their cash flow. In a couple of clicks creatives are booked, payment flows locked, and invoices automatically generated. Flow is taking a clunky, arduous process on both sides, and transforming it into one of the world’s most frictionless payments experiences. Founder: Glen Cassidy.
Flux (AU) | Flux is a gamified financial education platform that rewards young Australians for adopting positive financial habits around saving, credit and more. 50% of young Australians feel their finances are out of control, sparked by a lack of financial education at school, a lack of a savings plan, and the growing ‘buy now, pay later’ lifestyle, which can lead to debt cycles. Flux has turned financial education into a game by rewarding young Australians for adopting positive financial habits around saving, credit and more. Founders: Brett Joffe, Justin Joffe and Gustavo Hoirisch.
Psylo (AU) | The way we treat mental illness is broken, and mounting research suggests psychedelics will play a key role in future treatments. Psylo is Australia’s first psychedelic biotech company. Its mission is to develop psychedelic medicines to redefine how we treat mental illness. Founders: Joshua Ismin and Samuel Banister
Layer (AU) | Layer is helping game creators access brands, characters and stories that players love. It is powering the next generation of collaborations, like Travis Scott’s performance to 38 million people in Fortnite, or the $200m mega hit ‘Kim Kardashian’s Hollywood’. Layer matches games and IP that are a mutual commercial and creative fit, removing the friction and risk that today limits collaboration to the largest players. From helping an emerging indie dev land their first IP tie-in, to providing the building blocks of the virtual worlds bringing us closer to the metaverse, Layer is the simplest way to secure the rights to content that players love. Founders: Rachit Moti and Chris Illuk.
Find A Helpline (NZ) | Find A Helpline is the global safety net for people in crisis, connecting people to free emotional support, anywhere, anytime. People are increasingly turning to the internet in times of emotional crisis, including suicide, self-harm and overwhelming anxiety. Companies across social media, search and mental health recognise the vital role they play and are investing in keeping their users safe. Find A Helpline is an emotional support matching tool powered by the largest, verified helpline dataset in the world. For those in crisis, it’s a quick, personal and private bridge to the right help for them. For companies, it’s a measurable and global crisis support solution, deployable in minutes. Founder: Elliot Taylor
Opvia (AU) | Opvia’s mission is to help B2B organisations sell more by making their quoting fast, easy and 100% accurate. Their first product Flexile is a configure-price-quote (CPQ) SaaS application that is designed to be a single source of truth company wide for product and pricing information. Flexile gets your product and pricing out of spreadsheets and into an online tool that saves time and errors by eliminating the need to add your products to CRM. In addition, all changes are tracked delivering the real-time collaboration that distributed workforces require. Quoting complex products can be time consuming and inaccurate, which can cost businesses time, money and lost sales. Opvia’s Flexile application makes quoting easy and fast, delivering increased sales and lower costs. Founders: Matt Hollis and Jarrad Seers.
Ripe Robotics (AU) | Ripe Robotics builds fruit-picking, modular robots that pick fruit faster and with better precision than humans. Each year there are over 1 trillion pieces of fruit picked by hand around the world. However, farmers increasingly face difficulty finding labour. About 10-20% of some fruits are also damaged by human pickers, which results in significant revenue losses for farmers. Ripe Robotics’ robots are also modular and are designed to work on different fruit types. In the long term, they’ll also be able to do other tasks on orchards, such as data gathering, pruning, thinning, and spraying. Founders: Hunter Jay and Leopold Lucas.
Shipeezi (AU) | Shipeezi is a horizontal software that integrates the entire supply chain from point of origin to final destination. It provides shippers (international or national), freight managers (forwarders/shipping lines) and carriers full transparency and visibility of all product movements at all times. Through the Control Tower visibility, power is given back to shippers over their supply chain, saving them more than 30% in logistics costs and more than 60% in time reporting. Founder: Carlos Ferri
The Mintable (AU) | The Mintable is a platform that empowers people managers with the confidence and capability to succeed. Aspiring and emerging managers accelerate their growth through virtual group coaching, connection with ambitious peers, and access to ongoing learning, community, and tools. The Mintable works directly with individual managers and partners with organizations that invest in their talent. Founders: Melissa Miller and Lauren Humphrey.
Transactional.ai (NZ) | Transactional Ai builds AI-powered bank transaction categorisation APIs that are accurate and customisable for each Fintech use case. Instead of hiring teams of data scientists to build, and armies of humans to maintain categorisation performance through endless labelling, Transactional APIs remove all the pain and overhead so fintechs can focus on building superior product experiences. Founders: Jiao Xie, Ian Wong, Wernsen Wong.
Vertus Energy (NZ) | Vertus Energy is disrupting the energy industry with a circular economy model that uses waste and CO2 to produce three times more energy than its competitors. With ten years of research on bacteria behaviour, Vertus Energy developed its protected technology that will help transition the world to 100% renewable energy. Vertus Energy generates renewable natural gas that can replace fossil natural gas, which amounts to 25% of the world’s energy demand. Founders: Benjamin Howard, Danilo Perez, Santiago de los Reyes and Freddy Gonzalez.
Vets on Call (AU) | Vets on Call is a platform-based solution changing the way vet services are acquired and delivered. Vets on Call is a technology-led business offering the highest level of veterinary care for your pet, in the comfort of your home. Covering the full range of care-based veterinary services, Vets on Call enables pet owners to schedule appointments at a time that suits them, and puts their pet’s health records in the palm of their hands. Vets on Call offers vets greater flexibility, an opportunity to enhance their income and a supportive community focused on the health and livelihoods of both pets and vets. Founders: Morgan Coleman, Rael Kuperholz and Nathan Sinnott.
Vxt (NZ) | Vst is an intelligent phone call and voicemail solution for lawyers and recruiters. Lawyers and recruiters spend hours each week on tasks associated with making phone calls, such as taking notes, recording time and generally retrieving and entering data into management systems. Vxt’s calling and smart voicemail apps enable lawyers and recruiters to make and receive phone calls and automate tasks associated with answered and missed calls. Founders: Luke Campbell and Lucy Turner.
Greenlake Medical (AU) | Greenlake Medical are building the next generation Clinical-AI Engine to optimise the Diagnose -> Treat -> Fund pathway for hospitals.
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