Mentors

Startmate is a mentor-driven seed fund and accelerator

For founders and mentors, the Startmate network is powerful and uplifting: once plugged in, you can access some of the best startup knowledge in Australia and New Zealand.

Startmate Mentors invest their own time and money.

Unlike any other program in the world, our mentors invest their own money into each cohort’s Startmate Fund.

This pool includes Australia and New Zealand’s top VC firms: Blackbird, Grok, Square Peg, Rampersand, Tempus Partners, Giant Leap Fund, Skip Capital and Eleanor Ventures.

The Startmate fund then invests $120k (at your latest valuation or ~8%) in each team. Each mentor’s investment is split across all teams in the cohort.

The magic is that everyone in Startmate is incentivised to work together and provide as much value as possible to all teams in the cohort.

Your success is our success.

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Mentors invest time and money to help startups 

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Enabling those startups to achieve success 

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Resulting in a greater return on mentors’ time and money 

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and become mentors themselves… and so on

Further enabling startups to achieve success 

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Leading to continued and increased investment 

How do I become a Startmate mentor?

If you are interested in becoming a Startmate Mentor, we ask you to first join our Startmate Supporter list.

We share our Supporters list with each cohort to give them access to the knowledge that exists within our wider community.

Periodically, the Startmate team will review our Supporter list and determine whether you might make a good fit as a Startmate Mentor.

Our cycle of success relies on Startmate maintaining very high calibre mentors, so to become a Startmate Mentor you must meet one of the following criteria:

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Founder
Previously founded a company and led it past Series A fundraising, or bootstrapped revenue beyond $1m ARR

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Investor
Invests in 2+ early-stage start-ups each year and has invested >$500k previously

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Scaler
Previously established a business unit within a seed-stage start-up that is now valued at >$10M or lead the expansion of a startup to a new country
Mentors
Caleb Maru
EntryLevel
Mentor
Matt Allen
Tractor Ventures
Mentor
Danny Wu
Canva
Mentor
Chloe Hamman
Culture Amp
Mentor
Casey Flint
Square Peg
Mentor
Chris Quirk
Rampersand
Mentor
John Wood
NOAB.Ventures
Mentor
Ben Grabiner
Platoon
Mentor
Erika Sa
Atlassian
Mentor
Glen Bartlett
Alberts Impact Ventures
Mentor
George Hartley
SmartrMail
Mentor
Michael Stocks
Linktree
Mentor
Emily Mason
Netreo
Mentor
Matthew Tracey
Palantir Technologies
Mentor
Gaby Howard
Carted
Mentor
Vignesh Kumar
Global From Day One
Mentor
Hamid Nazari
Innablr
Mentor
Lauren Capelin
AWS Startups
Mentor
Kate Morris
Adore Beauty
Mentor
Jeff Deutsch
ContactOut
Mentor
Andrew Rodgers
Co-founder
Mentor
Dan Johnston
Ignition
Mentor
Hamish Hawthorn
Propeller Aero
Mentor
Bosco Tan
Zip Co
Mentor
Bill Kerr
Athyna
Mentor
Kylie Frazer
Flying Fox Ventures
Mentor
Tom McLeod
Bitwise
Mentor
Colette Grgic
AWS
Mentor
Frederic Leforestier
many startups
Mentor
Zak Islam
Startmate
Mentor