Crowe Horwath, the regionally-focused arm of accounting and financial advisory firm Findex, has announced that it will be launching FoundX, a new initiative to support regional startups and small businesses.
FoundX will look to facilitate meetups for startup communities across regional Australia, where they will have the opportunity to access mentoring and information designed to help them grow their businesses.
Crowe Horwath said the initiative was formed to help empower regional startups by leveraging the firm’s national regional network.
With over 110 offices spread across Australia, Crowe Horwath has a number located in regional and rural towns, which connect customers to the firm’s 3000-strong financial advisor network.
The firm also offers a service tailored to agribusinesses, with a portion of its advisory network coming from agricultural backgrounds; it also acts as an advisory partner to the National Farmers Federation (NFF), an organisation supporting Australian farming businesses.
Focusing on networking opportunities will be key to each event, with the firm saying that FoundX will aim to connect entrepreneurs to “valuable networks” across Australia.
Planned to be rolled out nationally, Geelong will be the space for FoundX’s first “regional hub”, with a launch event set to kick off the initiative in the city next Thursday.
Mark Whelan, executive managing partner at Crowe Horwath, said Geelong’s strong local startup community makes it the ideal location for the launch.
“Geelong is one of Australia’s largest regional centres and was selected as the first regional hub in the national roll-out of FoundX due to its thriving startup and small business community. We have seen Crowe Horwath grow as part of that community and this is a great opportunity to give back,” he said.
Speaking at the launch event will be Con Raso, founder of Turned Global, and Tim Heasley of venture capital firm Artesian, who will provide insight into what VC firms look for when investing in Australian startups.
FoundX marks the latest supportive initiative Findex has developed to support regional startups and small businesses, with last year seeing the firm work beside the NFF to launch national agtech accelerator SproutX.
The first agtech-focused accelerator within Australia, SproutX was created to help spur on Australia’s agtech boom, with the program first offering an online pre-accelerator program to 100 startups across Australia.
SproutX also recently announced the first cohort of startups to be accepted into the program.
Out of a pool of 100 applicants, 11 startups were selected, with each set to recieve mentoring from agtech industry experts, as well as $40,000 in capital in exchange for eight percent equity.
The program will run in SproutX’s Melbourne coworking space over a six month period.
Image: Crowe Horwath Team. Source: Linkedin.
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