Startmate held its Demo Day last week for its biggest ever cohort of startups, 18, alongside raising $2 million to invest in the Summer 21 cohort.
More than 1,000 people turned into the livestream to watch the startups, which came from New Zealand as well as Australia, pitch their ideas.
Startmate Principal Lauren Capelin said investor interest from Demo Day was strong.
“Our founders are pushing the boundaries of healthtech, community-driven business models, fintech, agtech and the creator economy,” she said.
“The calibre of founders we met through the selection process for the Summer21 is a sign of the strength and increasing maturity of our region as a startup hub of global significance.
“Our incredible Summer21 cohort of 18 companies from across the ANZ region was our largest yet. This milestone was possible because of the $2 million fund we raised directly via our mentor network—a huge vote of confidence in the future success of the founders in the cohort.”
Here are the 18 startups in Startmate’s Summer21 cohort and brief pitches on their ideas.
Atlasshorts
Atlasshorts is an Australian subscription-based eResource connecting the world through shared stories.
Indie filmmakers struggle to show their work to anyone other than the die-hard enthusiasts. Teachers and libraries rely on a homogenous list of content suppliers.
Atlasshorts lets indie filmmakers upload films to its platform, which then serves the content to millions of users at schools and libraries.
Atlasshorts unlocks an entirely new audience and revenue stream for indie filmmakers and visual storytellers. Its community connects users to films and visual media, users to users and films to more films.
Founders: Karim Ford Sarhan + Bruce Maton.
Cake
Cake is an Australian fintech on a mission to simplify the way start-ups and small to medium-sized companies raise capital, set up employee share schemes and manage their investors.
It does this by providing software that connects the legal processes into the cap table, and converging the relevant parties onto the one platform. The platform streamlines deals by helping companies raise capital and issue options, offering a simple and fast alternative to the usual endless spreadsheet, emails and PDFs.
For equity funding via shares, options, SAFE notes, it’s a piece of Cake.
Founders: Jason Atkins + Kim Hansen + Johan.
CodeLingo
CodeLingo is a New Zealand-based SaaS product that finds project-specific issues in code.
Tech debt costs Global GDP US$3T (The Developer Coefficient Report, Stripe Sept 2018).
Poor knowledge sharing in dev teams is the number one cause of tech debt and the number two problem in software development, second only to capacity (State of Software Development Report – Coding Sans 2020).
CodeLingo’s new product Notebooks help development teams work with the code and each other.
It’s simple doc UI has powerful blocks (paragraphs) that integrate deeply with the code, repo and team—speeding up the development cycle. Think Notion for developers.
Founder: Jesse Meek.
Cropsy Technologies
Cropsy is a New Zealand-based agtech offering an end-to-end hardware/software solution to better monitor and effectively manage high-value crops.
High value crops like wine grapes need constant care and attention, but it’s impossible for growers to check every single plant regularly.
Cropsy provides an end-to-end hardware/software solution that integrates with current workflows affordably. It gives growers the insight of a thousand eyes by using AI and machine learning to analyse millions of images and data points in real-time, all while tractors are out and about doing other daily jobs.
Founders: Ali Alomari + Leila Deljkovic.
Emmi
Emmi is an Australian climate technology company providing comprehensive financial perspectives on carbon risk to enable better investment decisions for its users.
Climate Change has created two major risks— Physical and Carbon Risk. Carbon Risk needs to be solved to mitigate Physical Risk, however currently there is no easy, trusted and scalable way that helps institutional investors and corporates solve for it.
Using Emmi, institutional investors & corporates can understand the financial impact of carbon across any portfolio or company. This will allow them to avoid stranded asset risk and financial loss by using Emmi to understand, anticipate and accelerate the market changes required for a net zero economy.
Founder: Michael Lebbon
Entry Level
Entry Level is an Australian employment company creating the world’s first scalable reskilling engine to empower 500M people to find, explore and attain more fulfilling careers.
By 2030, 40% of the world’s population will need to be drastically reskilled or be unemployed. There is a need for scalable, mass scale reskilling to avoid large numbers of structural unemployment.
Entry Level helps people with ‘hard pivots’ in their career using data-driven insights to help people decide on career trajectories and reskilling.
Once they have decided on a particular career from Entry Level’s content and search engine, they can use its virtual work experience programs to fast track their way to being an ‘experienced’ team member.
Founder: Ajay Prakash.
GGWP Academy
GGWP Academy is an Australian e-learning and influencer marketplace platform providing education and opportunity to gamers globally.
The esports and gaming industry is growing rapidly at 38% year on year, and needs a central hub for education and connecting with brands.
As the companion platform for users or platforms such as Twitch and YouTube, GGWP educates, uniquely ranks, aligns, connects, measures and streamlines payment processes between brand and influencer.
Founders: Jacqueline Garrett + Cassie Puah + John Keto
Great Wrap
Great Wrap is an Australian manufacturing startup offering the only Australian-made compostable cling wrap.
Plastic waste is a well known, huge environmental problem The lack of innovation from manufacturers has left us with oceans of plastic and very little solutions.
Great Wrap is the only Australian made compostable cling wrap and pallet wrap. Its stretch wrap is made using food waste as the main raw material. The company is on a mission to change the landscape of packaging.
Founders: Julia Kay + Jordy Kay
Hullbot
Hullbot is an Australian company using autonomous robots for clean hulls and healthy oceans.
Hullbot ends the global reliance on toxic antifouling paints used on boats and ships which are expensive, ineffective and harmful to the environment. Its technology saves all vessel owners money and creates healthy oceans through underwater robotics at scale.
Through designing, developing and deploying the world’s only autonomous drone platforms that can swim, inspect and clean anything underwater,m Hullbot solves the inescapable need for every underwater structure to be kept free from fouling.
Founders: Tom Loefler + Karl Watfern
Jobloads
Jobloads is a New Zealand-based job marketplace helping people find meaning and thrive at work.
The company currently services food and fibre producers in New Zealand with plans to expand into Australia. 34.4 million people work in agriculture globally.
In a post-COVID world with limited migration and travel restrictions, many food and fibre producers across the globe have been left short of workers. At the same time, workers want to feel more valued at work and producers are frustrated with an unreliable labour supply.
Jobloads is solving this market problem through a platform that puts respect for the human rights of every worker in the supply chain at its centre.
Founders: Candice Pardy.
Keylead Health
Keylead is an Australian digital health company accelerating new cures with holistic medical insights.
Continuous and long-term capture of clinical data and analysing them in near real-time is a major problem in clinical trials that delays market capture for new drugs, limits scaling trials, and cannot be done remotely. This ultimately leads to loss of lives and billions of dollars for healthcare providers.
Keylead is a digital health company, building an AI-driven SaaS data platform to make it easy and engaging for patients, doctors, and pharma to capture continuous and long-term clinical trial data.
Founder: Andi Partovi + Farhad Goodarzy.
Komodo Wellbeing
Komodo is a New Zealand-based platform offering tailored software for schools to prevent student wellbeing issues.
Students regularly face serious wellbeing issues such as bullying, body image and academic pressure; issues which have been amplified by social media.
Komodo is an analytics platform that is optimised for understanding student wellbeing and helping staff utilise this data to make crucial interventions.
It gives every student a voice when they need it most and empowers staff by taking the guesswork out of wellbeing.
Founders: Chris Bacon + Jack Wood + Matt Goodson.
MilestonePay
MilestonePay is an Australian fintech that makes doing business with untrusted parties fair through the use of living milestone based contracts.
In the space of digital native freelancers and agencies, payments for services rendered can take weeks or months to be received and processed, leading to bumpy cash flow and making it challenging to generate predictable revenue.
MilestonePay is a contract automation and payments platform that reshapes B2B engagements through living contracts, designed to protect both parties.
On the platform you are able to generate contracts with specific milestones and deliverables and get paid as each milestone is completed.
Founders: Ryan Handby + James Claridge
Milkdrop
Milkdrop is an Australian company on a mission to revolutionise the breast pumping experience.
New mothers have unnecessary nipple pain and discomfort using breast pumps to express milk. Milkdrop estimates 140,000 women in Australia and 2.5 million women in North America have a poor pumping experience each year.
Milkdrop is starting from the nipple up, this week launching a soft silicone cushion that fits most breast pump heads designed on the physiology of a baby suckling, making them softer, more natural feeling and far more comfortable for women.
Founders: Alexandra Sinickas + Ravi Bessabava + Dr Andrew Mason + Daniel Prohasky.
ResusRight
ResusRight is an Australian healthcare company that aims to save millions of newborn babies from death and disability by developing a monitor to help clinicians resuscitate better at birth.
It’s estimated that, each year, a million babies die and a million babies develop a permanent disability due to a lack of oxygen at birth.
Most of these disabilities, and 30% of these deaths, are preventable. Current resuscitation equipment doesn’t provide enough feedback to the clinician to enable them to resuscitate effectively.
ResusRight wants to revolutionise the standard of care for neonatal resuscitation by developing a monitor that provides breath-to-breath feedback to the clinician.
The ResusRight monitor fits onto existing equipment and helps clinicians get it right every time.
Founders: Matt Boustred + Matt Crott + Dr Mark Tracy
Sicona Battery Technologies
Sicona is an Australian battery technology company developing cost-effective, high performance battery materials that can increase electric vehicle range and reduce the cost of lithium ion battery energy storage systems.
Electric vehicle (EV) range limitations and high upfront costs due to current limits in lithium ion battery cell energy density.
Sicona provides a solution to these major problems through our innovative battery anode and binder materials which can extend EV range by more than 50% or reduce the cost of a Tesla Model 3 by A$10,000.00.
Founders: Christiaan Jordaan + Andrew Minett
Telecare is an Australian healthtech company bringing specialist medical care to those living in remote, rural and regional parts of Australia via telehealth.
Its ambition is to break down the barriers between the thousands of Australians who don’t have access to specialists with an affordable, mobile model that has multiple benefits for both patients and providers alike.
Telecare creates the marketplace, software and administration platform allowing its specialists and allied health professionals to be matched with the right patient and to deliver their services seamlessly.
Founders: Lina Xu + Michael Wang + Dr Raymond Wen + Dr Christopher Sia.
ULUU
ULUU is an Australian biotech company developing an ocean material that’s carbon negative, home compostable and able to replace all kinds of plastic.
Consumers and brands are eager to decrease their plastic & carbon footprints and revive the oceans.
Uluu allows consumers and brands to replace any type of plastic with a durable biomaterial that’s not only home and marine compostable, but also actively benefits the world: it sequesters up to 5X its own weight in CO2 and is made from seaweed, which helps to clean up our oceans and promote marine biodiversity.
Founders: Julia Reisser + Michael Kingsbury
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