Last night in North Melbourne the startup community gathered to watch the pitches of Startmate’s latest Sydney cohort. Considered by most to be Australia’s best startup accelerator program, Startmate certainly didn’t disappoint with 8 strong pitches of promising new companies.
Founded in 2010, Startmate has invested in 99 startups with a combined valuation of over $600,000,000. Over 1400 jobs have been created by the startups that went through the program. And, for the first time since the launch of the accelerator, this year’s cohort had at least one female founder on 50% of the teams.
Straight up exploding with pride for tonight’s @Startmate founders pic.twitter.com/Qb4i4NpQEa
— Murray Galbraith (@MurrayDG) April 11, 2019
Muso
First off the rank was Muso who are make booking artists for venues easy. Their mission is to create more live music – definitely a pitch that resonates with a Melbourne audience.
The team of 3 co-founders launched a marketplace to find and book artists just seven weeks ago and on their first day had 38 gigs booked through the platform.
Fast forward to today and they have facilitated 400 gigs which equates to $120,000 of bookings.
Alan, Brandon and Jeremiah are looking to raise a $1,200,000 seed round to go after a 1B/year addressable market here in Australia. They are also looking to expand into NZ very soon with 50 MoU’s signed already.
Learn more: musoapp.com.au
Vapar
Next up were Amanda and Michelle of Vapar who are using machine learning to automate fault detection in infrastructure, with water pipes being an initial focus.
With 7.2 billion being spent globally on monitoring the condition of water pipes these two founders are tapping into a very lucrative market. To date, they have secured six paid pilots and one large confirmed enterprise customer.
Vapar innovates on existing solutions by taking uploaded footage and analysing it for defects along the pipeline. Amanda used to spend 8 hours a day doing this manually. Their technology takes what used to be a 2-week process and brings it down to 2 minutes.
They are currently raising a $500,000 pre-seed round with an aim of reaching $3,000,000 in annually recurring revenue within 18 months.
Learn more: vapar.co
Vexev
Cardiovascular disease is the single largest cause of death globally, with more than 1 in 4 people dying from it. Early detection is the best way of reducing the risk of death.
Founder John Eamonn met his cofounder whilst studtying for his PhD and they developed a 3D imaging system which can monitor veins and arteries. The system has been rigorously tested with the Prince of Wales hospital who are using it regularly for patient scanning.
Assumably Vexev will be looking to sell their system to hospitals around the world.
Vexev was the only startup of the evening who weren’t looking for investors, having already raised their pre-seed round from Blackbird.
Glamazon
In 2015 Lisa & Lauren set out to disrupt the beauty market, creating an ‘uber for beauty services’. They have since become Australia’s largest marketplace for at home beauty services. The platform enables freelancers to earn up to $80/hour compared to the traditional $23/hour made in a salon.
Glamazon has since decided to develop a new business and marketing software system for beauty freelancers which they believe will increase their annual revenue per freelancer by 10x.
If they get it right they then have a 260 billion dollar global beauty market to go after.
Glamazon will be opening a round of investment later in the year.
Learn more: glamazon.com.au
Cogniant
Cogniant has developed an automated patient engagement system for mental health, currently being used by 2 hospitals in Singapore.
The system utilises your smartphone usage data to detect early signs of relapses before they happen. This information is then passed to clinicians and potential family members who can monitor the patient’s progress. Current pilots are showing a 10% reduction in hospital re-admissions which helps save a hospital more than $5,000,000 a year.
In 2018 Australia spent $29 billion on mental health disorders which shows the market potential for a tool like this.
The founding team have a mix of data science, psychology and enterprise sales expertise and are looking to raise a seed round of $1,000,000 with $205,000 already committed.
Learn more: cogniant.co
Clickcharge
Tom wants a world where every surface charges your device wirelessly. He and the team have developed a scalable wireless charging technology which they claim can charge phones and even laptops at the same time.
It’s a tile-based system which can click together capable of building a charging surface of any size.
With international patents secured they are looking to succeed where Apple failed with their recent withdrawal of Airpower from their product roadmap.
Clickcharge is looking to raise $1,700,000 in order to manufacture 40,000 units. They have thus far secured trials with Atlassian and ANU.
Learn more: clickcharge.io
Bioscout
Australian farmers currently lose 20% of their crop yield every year due to various diseases and pests. More than $2.5 billion dollars is spent on preventative products every year.
Saron and her team have developed an airborne disease tracking solution which they are selling for $30,000 a unit with a $2,000/m subscription. They claim this can save a farm $73,000 a month in preventative sprays usually purchased.
They currently have Australia’s second largest banana farmer as a customer along with 14 other farmers who have signed up in the last 3 months.
Bioscout is raising a $2,500,000 seed round and aiming to hit $14,000,000 in ARR within 2 years.
Ligr
Ligr Systems were initially a sports production company who have evolved into a technology solution which helps address the expensive hardware and people costs that are associated with live streaming local league sports.
Their automated and scalable live graphics software was first picked up by Football NSW who went from streaming 2 games a weekend to 18.
With $420,000 in revenue already committed til 2022, the team is aiming for a big vision of connecting brands to live stream viewers around the world.
Luke and his team of five are looking to raise $2,000,000 to try and reach $5,000,000 in annually recurring revenue.
Learn more: ligrsystems.com
Well done to all the teams who pitched on the evening.
Super impressed with the current Startmate batch. With all the recent Aussie tech doom and gloom… I walked away excited about the future. #startmate
— Adrian Mullan (@cafenatic) April 11, 2019
Applications for the next Melbourne cohort of Startmate are now open. Learn more and apply here.
Featured photo credit to @KaKaUandME
