Ananya Sinha

A little over five months ago, I wrote a post about the mission behind Electrifi Ventures (see link in comments), a Climate Tech-focused angel syndicate I’m running alongside GrowthStream, an advisory business in the energy transition space. By sharing my time and knowledge with both seasoned and aspiring investors, I aim to amplify our collective climate impact through angel investing. Fast forward to today, I am thrilled to share with you our incredible journey to being one of the largest independent Angel Syndicates, with over 250 Angel Investors / LP’s across ANZ! In less than a year since starting Electrifi Ventures, we are proud to have invested in seven industry-transforming climate startups, and we are backing these companies with conviction: Sicona Battery Technologies: a game changer for the uptake of Electric Vehicles, is a deep tech company creating advanced materials that improves the overall performance of lithium-ion batteries. Sicona believes it is able to increase charging speed by 40% and deliver 20% more range on EVs.  GOTERRA: an autonomous circular food waste management infrastructure that is integrated with existing systems to create enduring industry solutions.  Harvest B: a food technology business that develops and manufactures plant proteins with animal protein-like textures that are easier to consume and more affordable for everyone.  NRN - National Renewable Network: a connected network of solar and storage systems that radically changes the way renewable energy is delivered for energy retailers. Stealth DAC Innovator: an innovative technology that is removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, at scale, in a cost-effective way, via Direct Air Capture (DAC). Threadlet: an energy efficiency platform that aims to automatically identify SME energy usage and switch business energy accounts to the best energy rate provider for every venue, every month. 📣 Would love to invite anyone interested to learn more (or invest) in innovative solutions tackling the climate crisis to join the Electrifi Ventures angel syndicate (link in comments).

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[HIRING] Help me out here LinkedIn - looking for a legend who will help hundreds of founders ❤️ 💥 FOUNDERS ASSOCIATE #1 Find the most ambitious early-stage founders to invest in ANZ #2 Your tools: run Launch Club and Buildmate to help hundreds of founders start and grow their startups every year >> which feeds back into #1 Link in the comments! Give this a like or tag a legend 🔥

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Some important work being done by Cake that could help shape the Australian startup ecosystem for the next decade. If you’re a founder or you work at a startup, please spend a couple of minutes to share your thoughts

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✨ Breaking: Melt Ventures Announces New Fund.- Melt Ventures Melt Ventures, a partner of the WAVC initiative, focuses on early-stage investments in sectors aligned with Western Australia’s innovation priorities. https://melt.ventures/ Please share to let other #Founders know For the ❤️ of Startups #Fusion42 #Startups #Venturecapital

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I'm very proud to see Crimson Education, founded by Jamie Beaton, Fangzhou Jiang, and Sharndré Kushor, cement its place in New Zealand's small stable of tech Unicorns. It's exciting to see an ANZ edtech focused on K - 12 education excel on a global stage. It's a proof point that the region can produce successful tech businesses beyond B2B SaaS. Crimson's journey has intersected with mine in curious ways. I remember spending the summer break with Jamie and Richard when they were applying to US universities; I must have proofread dozens of iterations of personal statements. I was then one of Crimson's first tutors in 2013, and recruited several others from ANU to support Crimson's expansion into tutoring HSC subjects. I remember having pizza with the team in Fangzhou's Unilodge dorm room, in between the information sessions they hosted for highschool students. From these humble beginnings, it's incredible to see Crimson grow into a world leader in college admissions consulting and online high school education - while accelerating to over $100m USD in annual turnover. At various times, I've heard Crimson cop criticism for creating a 'hack' for getting into elite universities. Having worked closely with a number of Crimson students - I think what Crimson really does is expand students' horizons, help them to hone in on what they're great at, and raise their ambition. Ever since he was 17 years old, Jamie has believed that the world could be his oyster. His optimism and energy is infectious; spending time with Jamie always raises my ambition too. It's marvelous to see him scale his superpower via the business he's built in Crimson Education. More about the raise in this article by Paul Smith -

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What’s happening in healthtech? 💊🎉 💰The Vic Gov will invest $7.5M to fund researchers to create 50 new startups  run by Breakthrough Victoria 💻 Safewill, bagged $17M to expand services like digital wills, power of attorney, & probate assistance 🧘‍♀️ Pronto Pilates snagged $1.6M in crowdfunding, to disrupt reformer pilates with affordable, trainer-free classes 💼 Hostplus committed $125M to VC, backing startups through IP Group plc Innovation Fund 📜 Private companies will now have to upload health data to My Health Record thanks to the Health Legislation Amendment Bill 2024 🧪 Aussie women will soon have access to at-home chlamydia & gonorrhoea tests 🤖 Baymatob won ‘AI Innovator - Healthcare’ at the Aus AI Awards for its maternal health tech providing early warnings for complications 🧬 The Fed Gov launched Genomics Australia, a national body to lead & coordinate genomic research, with a $30M commitment over 4 years 💼 Aus's $15B National Reconstruction Fund begins investing in deep tech, allocating $300M to boost quantum, robotics, & clean energy innovation ~~~🌎 US & Beyond the Borders 🌎~~~ 💍 ŌURA raised $75M, reaching a US$5B+ valuation, partnering with Dexcom to integrate glucose monitoring data into its platform 🧠 Headspace laid off 13% of its staff & is transitioning all therapists from employed roles 📈 WHOOP adds psychedelics tracking to its Journal feature, letting users log ketamine, LSD, & psilocybin use ⚽ David Beckham codeveloped longevity supplement brand IM8 Health with biotech company Prenetics, launching a longevity drink 💻 Eli Lilly & Company, the global pharma, invests S$42M in Singapore to launch a Digital Health Innovation Hub 🛠️ Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers trained a surgical robot using imitation learning from surgery videos Keen for the links & delicious deets?? 🍩🙌 Take a gander at last week's newsletter in the comments below👇😊 --- PS - if you liked this and are keen to join >8700 legends getting health tech and innovation news dropped direct to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter, What the Health, linked in the comments below! 💜 📩 #healthtech  #health  #healthcare  #digitalhealth  #medtech  #biotech

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This is a very interesting investment. While East Ventures is generally known to be sector agnostic and have a broad and diversified portfolio, investing in a seemingly non-tech and low-multiple sector is not a very VC-like behavior. Perhaps there is more to Har Har Chicken than just a food and retail play. The team is a strong one though, with the right elements of experience to bring this to scale. If we can have the likes of KFC or NeNe Chicken, why can't we have our own? But more importantly, this is another data point that VCs are trading high-risk growth for more stability and profitability. Given the need for VCs to play within the Power Law and generate returns within the fund cycle, Har Har Chicken needs to scale at least a 100x over the next few years to be worthy to sit in East Ventures' US$550m fund dedicated to Indonesia and South-east Asia. #venturebuilding #venturecapital ==================== Powering venture growth 💥 - Building 💯 SEA-founded ventures through Krux Asia, SEA's leading venture studio by SEA operators

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Board Meetings for Seed / A companies should be open discussions on ideas and strategy 🗣️ All investors should have read the Board Pack in advance (and it should be sent 48 hours+ in advance). Specific governance / finance questions can be asked in an email chain or WA group beforehand. When the Board starts, nail any votes required in first 5 mins. Core focus of Board should = 2-3 key things that the Founders want to have a deep dialogue on, where the other members can be the sounding board. "This is our idea around our new marketing campaign. These are our channels." "We've narrowed down these three candidates for x role." "Here is prototype for our new product feature launching next month." "Here's the template for our Sales playbook for moving up market." "We a/b tested these two acquisition channels and have some preliminary data." No need to spend half the Board meeting talking about financials, the Board Pack will show if you've overspent, the reasons why and can be discussed async beforehand.

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Many Aussie/Kiwi founders eventually face the decision of: what market should I go to next? Often, the answer they land on is the US. The key decision points then become: 1) when should I enter the US? 2) how should I break in? I spent the last 2 weeks with US VCs in San Francisco and New York, exploring those two questions and understanding what they've seen work and what they've seen fail. If you're in the early stages of building a venture scale business, I wrote the below as a simplified guide for thinking through those two decision points: https://lnkd.in/gY2JzByV

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This post is great for Startmate, but don't ignore the headline: "9 out of 10 times VC loses money". This is a truth a lot of startup founders just don't get... when you take VC, you think you've made it... but *most of the time* a VC writes a check it goes sideways. Getting VC is NOT a magnificent milestone... it's the start of a very risky journey. Think about that: your investor comes to your board meeting... and 8 or 9 out of every 10 board meetings they go to they know "this company ain't gonna make it". I'm not against VC's and I had a terrific VC in my company, but I don't think enough founders *understand* the realities of venture capital, *particularly* in Australia, where the whole ecosystem is quite immature and a long way behind the US. #VentureCapital #fundraising #VC #startups #founders

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📣 Excited to Announce an 8-Part Series on Innovation Frameworks & Emerging Technologies! #Innovation isn’t just about having great ideas. If it were, everyone would do it—and it wouldn't be a profession. Having worked at pioneering companies like IDEO and Disney, and on groundbreaking projects such as the F-35 fighter jet and manufacturing in space, I can tell you: innovation is a career. It’s a methodical process, similar to that of a visionary founder, and like any skill, it can be learned. That’s why I’m launching this series! 🚀 This quarter (Oct-Dec) I’ll share practical tips, tools, frameworks, and real-world experiences from my nearly 20 years of tech-based innovation. From my time as a founder, civil servant, diplomat, product creator, business designer, corporate executive, and angel/VC investor, I’ve seen some organizations thrive with innovation while others hit roadblocks. So, how do you actually get innovation done? What does it look like in practice? 🌟 This series will break it down. Here’s what I’ll cover: 1️⃣ Parts 1-4: Innovation #frameworks: How to build strong, multidisciplinary teams, craft effective strategies, and work collaboratively for success. 2️⃣ Parts 5-8: Emerging #technologies: From AI and Robotics to Quantum Computing and 3D/4D, we’ll explore how these innovations will reshape industries, economies, and even societies. This isn’t just for big companies! Whether you're leading a startup, working in government, or driving new product development in a larger organization, this series will be a simple how-to guide to innovation, giving you insights to tackle today’s challenges and prepare for tomorrow’s opportunities. 💬 Let’s make this interactive! I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences. Got questions or want to share your own stories about innovation? Drop a comment below, or message me directly. #DesignThinking #ThreeHorizons #TripleHelix #HypeCycle #AI #robotics #QuantumComputing #4D

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Recently I was asked for some input on running a startup accelerator. Since I don't live in NZ, and I now work in growth capital not VC, that freed me up to be pretty candid. Here's what I wrote: Aus and NZ are innovative nations by nature, yet the incubator and accelerator model has been a copy&paste of American/Cambridge and Israeli models that have done nothing to stem the 80% fail rate. Rather than address this systemic failure, we have normalised failure by saying “well startups are just inherently high risk” That’s partially true, they are like high performance motorcycles : deadly in the hands of a rider who does not know how to ride it. But there's a big caveat: that's only true if you don't train the rider (founder) VCs meanwhile simply go unicorn hunting and stack more companies in their portfolio so that the binomial equation has more chance of yielding a return rather than address systemic failure. And so the façade continues: 80% fail. Of the 20% who “succeed”: 80% scrape themselves over the finish line saying “never again”. The 20% of the 20% then get rockstar-entrepreneur gigs lecturing to novice entrepreneur about how to succeed by copying their “sacrifice everything” model, no knowledge is actually passed on, because they are not skilled in knowledge transfer, and not able to abstract out what caused them to succeed vs what causes other entrepreneurs in a different context to succeed. Compare that to what happens in sports: ex-players value the art of learning to pass on knowledge, going through a long apprenticeship before they emerge, sometimes a decade later, as a successful coach of others. By contrast, in the world of tech startups, we have no ecosystem-wide emphasis on skill development of the founder, or helping them cultivate the mindset and habits they will need to run a company, grow a company, pitch, sell, lead, and scale the next generation of leadership so that they don’t become the bottleneck to growth. In short, we have a culture of complete neglect of growing the most important assets: the founders, even though Bill Campbell transparently demonstrated in his coaching of Steve jobs, Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt that treating founders like high performance athletes and giving them real coaching, not light touch mentoring that you’d be chastised for giving a 5th grade soccer team, was the recipe for scaleable success. So if your accelerator simply seeks to answer the question “how would I treat my founders if they were high performance athletes I wanted to win on the global stage” it will be better than 99.5% of the world’s incubators and accelerators.

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The “chiriakhana (zoo)” of angel investors The Angel investor ecosystem WA is abuzz with debates about Vinod Khosla’s recently made statement that 90% investors add no value to their investment and 70% detract value. They inspired the title from the legendary director Satyajit Ray’s old thriller movie about the idiosyncrasies of a highly heterogeneous group of people in one contained colony… aka the angel investment ecosystem. Here’s my take on the different types of Angel investors. Any resemblance to anyone specific in my angel networks is, of course, purely coincidental if not totally unintended. 1. The “Divine angels”- they are the God’s gift to founders - those who strike up a close relationship with founders and get involved on a regular basis from making connects, to brainstorming ideas to being an agony aunt/uncle. They are a rare breed. 2. The “main bhi CEO”s- these are the ultra intrusive folks who gun for 100% credit of success, 0% of failure with 5 % of effort. Founders suffer them due to SHA constraints before being compelled to rudely refuse the persistent advances. 3. The “impact players” - these investors only get deeply active during critical events like fund raises, big business pivots etc. Founders may dislike them when challenged but sometimes grudgingly respect them post facto. 4. The “main bhi angel”s - they are typically the victims of peer pressure in funding someone familiar with a “change the world” story, usually having to write those initial (mis)adventures off and retreating into inactivity before falling again for FOMO. Failed founders, if contactable, have to deal with their “how could this happen” lament. 5. The “equal opportunity” investors - blessed with large corpuses they invest in anything that sounds interesting … law of averages inevitably catches up with them. Founders love them as much for the money as for their indifference. 6. The “probability punters” - they follow their own versions of optimum portfolio size aspiring to improve the abysmal probability of success by leveraging multiple levels of curation through experts and platform processes in addition to their own instincts. They may wear the hats of “impact players” and “divine angels” for a few of their investments. 7. The “Shashi Tharoor” investors - typically tenured large company professionals who have ill adjusted to the start up ecosystem…they attempt to apply mega businesses idioms to fledging startups leading to incredulous founders and co investors. 8. The “consultant uninvestor” - they love the sound of their own voices and on angel platforms typically ask questions which are longer than the answers and, unsurprisingly, find very few ventures worthy of investing in. Many angel investors are like chameleons.. they can change their colours for different founders. But all of them are convinced that they are at least always in the 30% and on a good day in the 10% as per Mr. Khosla’s definitions. We are all exceptions.

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I’ve been so focused on building PurvX that I forgot to share some exciting news - PurvX has secured initial investments from angel investors, including a well-known Quant Fund (SEC obligation to keep it private until the round closes). It’s exciting to have the support of investors in these early stages as we build a circular economy marketplace for ethnic clothing and items, serving the massive South Asian community and beyond. This investment marks an important step toward scaling PurvX, and with the round just opening up, I’m looking to onboard investors who align with our values and understand the cultural nuances of what we’re building. Looking forward to what’s next, and always open to conversations with those who want to be a part of this journey! #startup #marketplace #circulareconomy #SouthAsian #Recommerce

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Seasoned startup and product builder Chris Saad on why a typical American user from the west coast is often worth about "five to ten times more" than an Australian user. We explored the fundamental differences between the Australian and American startup ecosystems - mindset, regulations, taxes, social safety nets, sophistication of investors, geography, talent density, capital availability, and so on. Check out the full conversation in episode 434 of the Future Squared podcast.

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We’re facing a deluge of ecommerce enabler startups, and honestly, I don’t quite know why. I’d like to figure out if there is a bigger trend at play here, and also see as many more companies as possible in this space to help develop a thesis. So if you have any gyaan to dispense, please share your thoughts here or DM me (and we can setup a call thereafter if needed). And if you are a founder in this space/ know somebody who is building in this space, please write to/ refer them to [email protected] Dilsher Dhupia Pranav Sanghvi Tanuj Saraf Merak Ventures

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Happy Wednesday everyone! 🎥 Trailer Alert 🎥 In our next episode of Unlocking Venture Capital, Sydney speaks with Michaela Gordon, former VC at The Westly Group, a firm with an AUM of $800M. Michaela is also the founder of The Early, a must-read newsletter for early-career founders and investors, providing them with actionable insights and valuable resources to navigate the startup world. 🚀 In this upcoming episode, hear from Michaela as she will: 🌟 Discuss the evolution of her newsletter, The Early, from a simple job board to a handy resource for early-career VCs, and how her position at the helm of this newsletter gave her an unparalleled overview of the Venture Capital space, with insights that go far beyond what a regular analyst would be able to see. 🌟 Reveal lesser-known aspects of VC recruiting, emphasizing the importance of sourcing abilities over traditional financial skills. 🌟 Highlight emerging trends in venture capital, including her focus on innovating antiquated industries like hardware design. 🌟 Provide valuable advice for aspiring VCs on building relationships, creating content, and navigating the self-directed nature of analyst roles. 🌟 Share her inspiring journey from the world of professional tennis to that of venture capital, highlighting her unique perspective as a young VC who pursued two seemingly disparate dream careers and managed to excel in both. 🌟 Explore the growing trend of angel investing. Michaela discusses at length the reasons for its growing appeal and why it serves as a way for people who are eager to take control of their financial future and create wealth by investing earlier in their careers. 🌟 Offer insight into the changing VC landscape, comparing the booming job market of two years ago to today's more competitive environment. This upcoming episode will be a must-listen for anyone looking to break into venture capital or gain insights into the industry from an early-career perspective. Michaela's unique journey and fresh outlook offer invaluable lessons for both newcomers and seasoned professionals in the VC world. The full episode will be available on our YouTube and Spotify this upcoming Monday. 📅📺 You can find the link to Michaela's newsletter in the comments down below 📰😇 #VentureCapital #AngelInvesting #WomeninVC #Startups #Entrepreneurship #VCTrends #Investing #Tech

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📣 Excited to wrap up 2024 by helping more Australian founders crack the US market - without learning everything the hard way! This Thursday, I'm joining forces with Jason Booth from TaxStudio to share the essentials of US expansion - from flip-ups to tax strategies that help support sustainable growth. It will be a power hour to help founders gain insights that could save years of trial and error. We'll break down the complexities into actionable steps, sharing experiences and practical tips. Join us if you're planning your US journey for 2025. Your future self will thank you! 🚀 Details in comments ⬇️ #Startups #Scaleups #GlobalExpansion #USMarket #2025Growth

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How can we level the playing field for female founders if government policies keep setting us back? Here are two examples from this year alone: ➡ They made it harder for angel investors to invest by raising the minimum income requirements and narrowing work qualifications. This essentially meant less female and minority investors qualified and also made it harder for smaller companies to fundraise. ➡ Innovate UK’s “Women in Innovation” grant program quietly went from 50 promised grants to 25…until Dearbump founder Emma Abasi read the fine print and lit a torch. Both cases were reversed in short order after outcries. But why do we need the outcries? Why are we even in this stop-start motion of progress and decline? We need to protect the diversity of our investment groups and our tech sector. And we need to do it in an always-on way. #femalefounders #digitaltransformation #entrepreneurship

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