Spotlight #9 - Startups & Operators
Batko OS - increase your surface areas for luck to strike.
A lot of emails from me lately - I hope you enjoyed the TikTok deconstruction.
Before we go into the regular spotlight - here are two Startmate opportunities for you!
💫 Apply for the Virtual Summer21 Accelerator Cohort
If you’re an ambitious founder anywhere in Australia and New Zealand:
Apply by Sunday for our January cohort!
It’s a fully virtual program which gives you access to the best mentors in both countries.
💸 Apply for our Inaugural First Believers Program
If you’ve always thought about giving Venture Capital a try, but were never given the opportunity:
Apply for our First Ever First Believers Program!
Get exposed to startups, journal your thoughts, build your investment thesis - get to experience real or shadow investing. You don’t have to be a sophisticated investor to participate, we want to build the future investors and increase diversity in the investor pool.
😇 Angel Spotlight
Do you want to be featured as an Angel? Fill this out (10mins)
💸 Startup Spotlight
Do you want to be featured to Angels/VCs? Fill this out (10mins)
🛠 Operator Spotlight
Looking for a job? Get featured in the next Operator Spotlight - fill this out.
Have a job you want featured? Hit reply and send it my way.
What’s in this Edition?
Get Investment - Angels keen to connect
Invest - Startups keen to connect
Hire - Operators ready for a startup job
Apply - Latest startup jobs
Join - Startups that just raised
1) Get Investment - Angel Spotlight
Alex de Aboitiz
Industry: ~18 months ago I decided to focus my investing in Clean Tech
Stage: Pretty early: usually first or second round of funding.
Check Size: Usually between $25k and $50k
Investments to date: In terms of Angel Investing, 2020 looks like this:
New investments in GoTerra, Mosa Meats, H2Pro, Hyzon Motors and Living Carbon.
Follow on investments in Morse Micro, Vow Foods and SunDrive.
Have invested and mentored the last 9 Startmate cohorts! Lucky enough to be an LP in the Blackbird 2012 fund as well as one of the first investors in Thomas Rice's Innovation Fund. I also have some infrastructure investments - mostly in solar farms and green infrastructure.
Mandate
I don't have a fund or a mandate, so I am pretty much to free to invest in whatever I think makes sense. I like to say that I am an undisciplined investor - and a look at my portfolio will reveal all sorts of companies in different stages and industries. However, my plan is to focus on Clean Tech going forward as it is my way to help decarbonize the economy and fight climate change.
>> Get an intro here. + Tell us how you fit the thesis.
2) Invest - Startups Keen to Connect
🚨 Disclaimer* 🚨 This is not financial advice, nor a recommendation. Please connect with the founders directly to hear more.🥼 Lasertrade
Lasertrade is the premium marketplace for pre-owned medical capital devices.
Problem
We are helping doctors buy and sell medical capital with trust that they are selling to legitimate customers and buying genuine devices. We solve the three-pronged problem of trust, time and cost.
Solution
We connect buyers and sellers and once the price has been decided, we organise all the quality assurance checks to ensure the device is genuine and in working order and manage the logistics, saving the doctors time and money
How do you know it's a problem?
Over $100b of new medical capital equipment is sold every year, which means the old equipment needs to be sold somewhere. There isn't much choice out there. Although exact statistics on second-hand sales are unknown as it is often done off book, it is estimated currently over $1b of products are resold each year.
We are getting more sales each month, growing 15% revenue each month with over $40k in revenue last month, and November is looking even bigger.
What's your central unique insight?
With our experience of working in the industry, we understand the issues doctors face of being time-poor, inexperience in managing the sale and checks, and trusting that the devices are genuine.
🌁 Pyper Vision
Pyper Vision is on a mission to eliminate fog disruptions at aerodromes, empowering airlines, airports and ATC alike to maintain their revenue, operate on schedule and in safe conditions every time.
Problem
In Australia, 47% of Airports face significant operational disruption due to fog and mist, hindering airport reliability, efficiency and economy.
A pilot's ability to depart or land is restricted by the requirements to operate above published meteorological minima for both cloud ceiling and runway visibility.
On days where visibility is below met minima, all operations are stopped, disrupting commercial, general aviation, defense and emergency air operations.
Solution
Pyper Vision's fog dispersal technology comprises: a heavy-lift RPA, uniquely refined absorbent and dispersal system.
The system is programmed to fly a pre-set path based on the Airport's location, weather patterns, published IFR procedures and their visibility requirements.
The absorbent reduces the saturation of water in the air, forcing the fog to dissipate. The operation follows CASA rules and is timed for when the airport is "effectively" closed due to low visibility. It takes 30 minutes from set up to pack up and maintains they improved visibility beyond 2 hours.
How do you know it's a problem?
We've been analysing flight and weather data for over 5,000 airports around the world. By combining this data with operating costs we have calculated that fog at a small regional Australian airport can cost the relevant stakeholders over $4M per year. We have been engaging with industry throughout our development and currently progressing three airports on to early adopters agreements. The problem is seen across the globe and is a $50B+ problem globally.
What's your central unique insight?
Pyper Vision was created by a group of aviators and technology enthusiasts who were fed up with the disruption fog creates at airports.
Unlike existing automated landing systems, the team set out to develop an approach that could provide visibility to all operators, moving an aerodrome back to 100% of planned operations.
The technology has been designed with long-term sustainability and full automation in mind.
👩⚖️ Law On Earth
Affordable & immediate legal advice - a telelaw self-service platform putting you in control of your legals.
Problem
75% of the world can't access legal help because of where they live or because it's just too expensive.
Solution
We provide a free learning centre with guides on how to fix common legal issues, so the user can follow the guide, use the system to generate the correct document with relevant clauses, read the explanation of the clauses so they fully understand what they're creating and then book immediate legal advice in the platform with a lawyer who can give that advice, reverse the screen and draft into the document while the user is watching and then store the video securely on their dashboard to watch again later.
How do you know it's a problem?
We've signed a deal with Drake Workwise to facilitate providing 60,000 advice sessions to their employees, and a deal with Thomson Reuters to promote the platform to 5,500 law firms in Australia then 3,500 in NZ. We're in discussion with Xero, Salesforce, ActionCoach, Cloudtec Global and several other corporates about integrations. We have 2,100 users in the platform, 114 companies incorporated and 156 categories of legal documents available now.
What's your central unique insight?
By providing immediate access to legal advice at much lower rates, it will become a part of daily life, not just for extreme situations and accessed too late, or not at all, making situations much worse.
🏗 Equiprise Corporation
Equiprise - an autonomous solution using IoT and ML/AI to improve safety, productivity, efficiency and resource shortages in the crane industry worldwide.
Problem
Based on customer conversations and market research, we have identified 3 key common challenges the crane industry is facing. Number one is crane operational safety, although government bodies and company management team treat crane operational safety seriously, there are still incidents happening every year and in most cases, it is caused by simple mistakes, the industry needs a more effective solution. The second one is productivity and efficiency, we found that there are a lot of processes are manual and paper-based. Last but not least, labour shortage of crane operators, considering the level of risks associated to this role, and the uncomfortable working condition, most of the younger generations are not willing to work as crane operator, therefore, crane operator shortage becomes a notable issue in the industry.
Solution
To address these issues, we are working with our strategic partner to develop a tower crane autonomous solution which aims to minimise operational risk with fully autonomous operations, at the same time, increase productivity and efficiency, and remove crane operator from the cabin and replace with remote operators. The system has three parts, sensors and edge devices, IoT platform and ML/AI. With data captured by sensors and cameras, we use ML algorithm to analyse and simulate crane operator's experience and refining the model along the way, ultimately, the crane can detect the surrounding environment and objects, plan its movement route and make decisions itself.
How do you know it's a problem?
Cranes are one of the heavy machinery with the highest operating risk. According to CICA (Crane Industry Council of Australia), in the last 6 months, just for mobile crane operators in VIC/TAS, there were more than 100 reported incidents. In 2018, there were more than 600 tower crane incidents reported in China with more than 700 fatality cases. Operational safety is the number one problem we aim to solve at Equiprise. We have launched remote monitoring, remote diagnostics and anti-collision solutions, and secured our first customers in both Australia and China.
What's your central unique insight?
Government bodies and companies in different countries have been trying to introduce different safety standards and promoting various safety control mechanisms to improve operational safety for the crane industry, there are still a considerable amount of incidents happening every year. For crane operators, especially for tower cranes, the chance to escape and survive is low, the industry requires a more effective solution.
3) Hire - Operators ready for a startup job
If you’d like to join a startup - submit some info about yourself - here.
Whilst this fortnight we don’t have any operators looking for jobs
>> check out the Startmate Women Fellowship.If you want to make the jump into a startup with confidence, there is no better place for you than our 9-week program.
You can already register your interest for our next cohort which kicks off in late March.
4) Apply - Latest startup jobs
These are new roles which were posted in the last two weeks.
Startmate Alumni
Head of Product @ Work180 (Remote)
Customer Experience Agent @ Ovira (Sydney)
Ops & Customer Success Manager @ Sempo (Remote)
Startups
CFO @ Hydrogen Fuel Startup (SYD or MEL)
Legal Counsel @ Koala (SYD)
Head of Brand @ AdoreBeauty (MEL)
Business Development Lead @ Matrak (MEL)
Business Ops & Strategy Manager @ Deliveroo (MEL)
Marketing & Community Manager @ Poshmark (SYD & MEL)
Business Analyst & Finance Allrounder @ ZeroCo (Byron)
Content Marketing & Community Manager @ Intalayer (Remote)
Customer Success, People Partner & FP&A Lead @ SecureCodeWarrior (SYD)
VCs
Fund Accountant @ Blackbird (SYD)
Investment Manager @ Alberts Family Office (SYD)
Investment Principal @ Level Two (AKL)
Investment Associate @ Tempus Partners (SYD)
5) Join - Startups that just raised
Pro tip: Companies often time their fundraising PR when they are ready to hire.
FlareHR - $22m led by MYOB - employment software
Robobai - $5m led by AirTree - supply chain AI
Beforepay - $4m led by Airtasker chair - tap into your wage
Bookipi - $1.6m led by OIF & TEN13 - bookkeeping platform
Liquor Loot - $1m led by Angels - liquor as a service