Startmate

Grows the early-stage founder community in ANZ.

CEO of Startmate, focused on empowering people.

Works to improve the Accelerator experience for founders.

Partner who believes the more ambitious you are, the more likely you are to succeed.

Leads investments and product, helping angels back early-stage founders.

Serial technology founder and executive in enterprise software and AI/ML; a partner at Startmate who has invested in 100+ startups.

Manages finance automation and customer experience.

Leads marketing and community growth at Startmate.

Leads finance and fund operations at Startmate.

Invests in Australian and New Zealand founders alongside the First Believers community.

Creates content promoting the next generation of ANZ founders.

Disha Jain is an investment associate at Startmate who previously worked at Nextgen Ventures. She grew up in India and launched three businesses before age 15, generating over $50,000 in revenue. Currently, she evaluates investment opportunities at Startmate while supporting founder development initiatives through Startup Link at USYD.

Erika Enberg is Head of People at Main Sequence, where she works with portfolio companies, founders, and executives on building and scaling teams and leads the Portfolio People Leaders community. She has 20 years of experience in people and culture, including a decade working with venture-backed scale-ups across Australia, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the USA. Enberg is also a certified transformational coach and a member of the International Coaching Federation, focusing on coaching executives and leaders.

A startup founder who has led community and program initiatives and co-founded an AI-powered running app, focusing on curating events and connecting founders.

Laura Warden is Chief of Staff at New+Improved Ventures, where she builds founding teams and supports early-stage company development. Previously, she held operations roles at Google, leading global recruitment functions and people programs, and at Folklore Ventures, where she managed operations across governance, marketing, people, and portfolio support. Her career began in recruitment consulting before moving into broader operational and organizational development functions.

Founding team member at Workplace from Facebook, previously at Parse and Google.

Sam Bricknell is CEO and co-founder of Techvisa, an immigration consultancy specializing in visa solutions for technology professionals and companies across Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. The firm assists startups, scale-ups, and established businesses with visa processes including employer-nominated visas, short-term work visas, and specialist categories such as the Global Talent visa.

Usman Iftikhar is CEO of Catalysr, a pre-accelerator program for migrants and refugees, and has worked across for-profit and nonprofit sectors for 15 years across multiple countries. He has received recognition including the 2018 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year award and multiple fellowships and leadership honors in Australia and the Asia Pacific region. His work focuses on addressing climate change and the global refugee crisis.

George Robinson works in Strategic Partnerships at Peach Property, which is powered by OwnHome, where he collaborates with brokers on the process from pre-approval to settlement. He is also an investor and mentor with Startmate, supporting pre-seed and seed-stage founders in Australia and New Zealand on areas including go-to-market, capital raising, business model design, and investment readiness.