Startmate announces up to $150k for Startmate 2016 start up fund in partnership with Droga5

Startmate, an accelerator for Australia’s most ambitious technical minds, has announced a further $100,000 investment into Australia’s most promising startups. As part of the expanded program, Startmate has entered into a partnership with advertising agency Droga5 Sydney to help participants with the art of storytelling

The Startmate mentor network includes some of Australia’s most successful founders including Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar of Atlassian, and Bardia Housman who sold Business Catalyst to Adobe. As well, and perhaps even more importantly, prior alumni like Stuart Argue of Grabble (sold to Walmart Labs) and Mike Baukes and Alan Sharp-Paul of Scriptrock invest their time and money to help the future Startmate startups.

Applications for Startmate 2016 are now open, and close in September 30th.

Says Niki Scevak, founder of Startmate: “At our core we help nerds become great CEOs. Mainly, we do that by helping startups waste less time, focusing only on building product and talking to customers. But overarching all of it is the art of storytelling, which permeates every part of doing a startup, and that’s the reason why we’re incredibly excited to be partnering with Droga5.”

Startmate is partnering with Droga5 to help sharpen the communication of each company’s mission. Storytelling is something that is critical to every part of a startup, from convincing the best employees to join a company, getting customers to take a chance before they should and opening the wallets of early stage investors.

Droga5 will play a crucial role in the program, offering the counsel of local staff across the whole organisation. In addition, Droga5 at an agency level and local CEO Sudeep Gohil (pictured) will invest capital in each of the Startmate companies.

Says Gohil: “There are a lot of conversations going on in our industry about incubators, innovation programs and startup businesses, but there are very few partnerships that come close to the work that Blackbird and Startmate do. We are building a genuine, deep and exciting partnership which will ensure we can be as effective as possible in elevating the startups selected.

“For Droga5 and our team the benefits of the partnership with Startmate are abundant. We get the opportunity to flex digital muscles that can only be developed with the right people around the table and most importantly we are challenging our people, clients and partners to think of innovation in new ways. Our partnership with Startmate is part of a bigger shift for us into a broader conversation around business and creativity.

“As a company rooted in entrepreneurialism, it’s an honour for Droga5 to partner with Startmate to help like minded individuals breakthrough with their ideas. Often technical startups lack the experience of creating meaningful brands and communication strategies. This is something we can help them with, in turn learning equally as much from the startups about the world they are operating in and new technologies that may ultimately benefit our clients and our industry.”

Startmate invests in technical founders who want to create startups that are the best in the world not just the best in Australia. The accelerator invests up to $150,000 and opening up a network of successful technology founders from both Australia and the US.

From Startmate 2016 onwards, the program will have the ability to invest an additional $100,000 into the most promising startups, lifting the total amount of funding to $150,000. The mentor network will collectively vote which startups have made the most progress in the program and invest along the same terms as the seed round or if there are no co-investors, the startup will have the decision to accept the investment at a $2 million pre-money.