February 2022 Edition
Welcome to our first TEN13 Newsletter for 2022! It's been a running start to the year. We welcomed two new flight crew to the TEN13 team, and celebrated recent (Transition Level) portfolio exit with our good friends at Car Next Door. Let’s dive in!
A reminder about who we are:
We're building out Australia & New Zealand's largest syndicated venture capital platform, with 460+ investors made up of early employees, execs, and founders of some of the world's most exciting companies.
If you are excited about investing in global startup companies alongside us and our investors then you can sign up here (AUS/NZ Sophisticated investors only).
New TEN13 Flight Crew:
Alexander Cohen has joined the team in the role of Deal Operations, where he will help us scale up our deal-by-deal offering from the back-end. With over 10 years of experience in early-stage & scale-up enterprises, including 5+ years of that in London, we're thrilled to have him onboard as he has a rich history in product and operations and when he’s not at TEN13 he can be found mentoring idea stage startups to help launch their ideas.
Lara Baltes has joined us as Executive Assistant & Office Manager. She has previously worked within VC (Point Nine, Connect Ventures) & startups, having spent the last 5 years in Germany. Recently completing her MBA from ThePower, with a core focus on startup and entrepreneurial skills, Lara's 10+ year admin career has spanned from the first-hire at a bootstrapping startup (later purchased by Microsoft) to legal support in a top tier corporate firm, through to VC Ops in the startup hub of Berlin. When not working, Lara spends a considerable amount of time with her pup at the dog park.
Transition Level Investments Portfolio News:
Car Next Door, your Uber is arriving now!
Transition Level Investments' Portfolio Company Car Next Door has been acquired by Uber (NYSE: UBER).
We are super excited for founders Will Davies and David Trumbull as they commence their new journey under the Uber banner. We are extremely fortunate to have been along for the journey since Steve Baxter's family office invested through Shark Tank in 2015.
Will and the team have shown remarkable resilience through COVID-19, continuing their growth trajectory and innovating on product. It is no wonder that it drew the attention of a major international transportation powerhouse like Uber.
Will holds the 'record' out of all the TEN13 and TLI portfolio companies for the most detailed and consistent portfolio company updates.
We wish Will, Dave, and the whole Car Next Door team, all the best with the next phase of their roadtrip under Uber.
FloodMapp US$7m Seed with USV
FloodMapp has completed a US$7m investment led by Venture Capital mainstay Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures.
FloodMapp has been hard at work building out their deeply technical, precision, real-time and predictive floodmapping technology. An example of their usage includes a partnership with leading navigation app Waze, and their pilot city of Norfolk, Virginia for providing residents with real-time navigation around floodwaters.
FloodMapp's technology has been utilised to assist with the current Queensland flooding and we can't thank the team enough for their round-the-clock updates on the continued flood situation.
A big congratulations to co-founders Juliette and Ryan; we have already seen how valuable the software has been over the last week here in Brisbane.
CohortGo prepping for the next phase
After emerging in a position of strength post-pandemic, CohortGo Founders Mark Fletcher and Paul Jones are exploring corporate options for the business to take it to the next level.
CohortGo sat down with Street Talk to chat through their recent engagement of RBC as well as detailing some of their high-level metrics.
Welcoming new TEN13 investments
Welcome to Instant!
Brendan Hill led this deal with Instant co-founders Liam Millward and William Gao in their vision of a world with 1-click checkouts and substantially streamlined consumer checkout process.
Checkout (no pun intended) our investment notes here and their run in the Sydney Morning Herald.
MarketForce raises US$40m to build the Retail Merchant Super-App for Africa
As we continue our push into emerging markets with a core focus on Africa, we're very excited to support Tesh Mbaabu, Mesongo Sibuti, and the MarketForce team on their USD$40m Series A alongside lead investor V8 Capital Partners.
MarketForce are building the financial and operating stack for the 100 million+ informal merchants on the continent and with this round of capital, they will expand to offering BNPL stock financing for their merchants.
Our investment notes in Mr Yum Series A: The next course
We joined the Mr Yum rocketship through TEN13 as lead investors in their Seed round in late 2020, and there are so many things to point to that get us excited about what's happened but more importantly, what's ahead.
Hence, we were excited to be refuel the ship in late 2021, and support them for the third time in their record-breaking US$65m Series A.
Read on below for our investment notes on 'The Next Course'.
Investment Notes - Mr Yum (Series A)
TEN13 in the News
TEN13 Co-founder and Managing Partner Stew Glynn sat down with the Australian Financial Review to talk about his journey into Venture Capital from working in Strategy and Operations at General Electric and Mergers & Acquisitions at KPMG to Venture Capital and how to become an angel investor.
AFR: Deal maker into angel investor
Carted Off-Site at Carted House:
Carted Co-Founder and CEO Holly Cardew breaks down how to run a killer offsite, complete with tips on dealing with a huntsman spider, the go-to food education kit for non-Aussies and their Q&A session with Chair of Tesla, (Aussie!) Robyn Denholm.
Heaps Normal Win Big at the Telstra Business Awards:
Congratulations to Heaps Normal for their success at the Telstra Business Awards! They took out awards in the categories of ‘Embracing Innovation’ and ‘Outstanding Growth’.
Pearler on the 'get rich slow' movement
Pearler Co-Founder and CEO Nick Nicolaides sat down with the Australian Financial Review to talk through their automated, ‘get rich slow’ investment platform, empowering its investors to invest in ETFs through automated monthly transactions and engage with the portfolios of other ‘Finfluencers’ on their community platform.
Go1 shares a pandemic war story with the Courier Mail
Go1 CEO and Co-founder Andrew Barnes sat down with the Courier Mail, sharing how they negotiated a fundraise in March 2020 while everything was “just falling off a cliff”. Andrew shares how they doubled down to raise more than US$200m in 2021 and achieve their Unicorn status.
Events this year
Syndicates with Cake Equity
Stew joined Cake Co-Founder Jason Atkins and Amplified Intelligence CEO Karen Nelson-Field on Cake Equity’s Startup Funding Series chatting all things syndicates and early-stage fundraising. Stew chatted through our unique TEN13 model and Jason and Karen talking through their respective fundraising experiences.
Dinner with Mr Yum founder
Stew and Lach caught up with half the Mr. Yum Co-founders Kim and Adrian on the Gold Coast! The pandemic has certainly changed fundraising forever - Almost 2 years without catching up in person (due to international travels, COVID, border closures)! In any case, it was great to chat on their strategy, international expansion and plans for 2022. We couldn't be more excited for what lies ahead of them.
Upcoming Events
Founder AMA with Kim & Holly
Join us at 12pm (AEST) Monday 7th March as we sit down with two of Australia’s most exciting and ambitious emerging founders: Holly Cardew (Founder / CEO of Carted) and Kim Teo (Cofounder / CEO at Mr Yum).
We will dive into the detail on rapid scaling, fundraising, international expansion, hiring top-talent, and company culture as a moat.
More than 42% of TEN13 capital to date has been invested behind female founders, well above the industry norm. It's intentional that we are focussing on two of our favourite female founders just 24 hours before International Women's Day - these are the types of superstar founders that we are thankful to support.
We will open to the crowd to have your questions answered in an Ask-Me-Anything event.
Don’t miss out! Sign up at the link below 👇 and please send us your questions:
Join Kim & Holly AMA - 7th March. Sign up here!
Join TEN13 - we're hiring:
TEN13 is the air pressure at ground level right before take-off (that’s 1013hPa for all you aviation friends). We're fuelling ambitious founders from their initial pre-flight checks all the way into the gulf stream.
TEN13 backs global startups early on their journey, with a core focus on APAC, US, and Africa, and cheque sizes ranging from $250k - $10 million. We’re known for jumping up at the first boarding call and being the last to disembark, fuelling founders with support, guidance, and the follow-on capital for the long-haul through Series A, B and beyond.
And we're doing it with a new model of funding called deal-by-deal venture capital, at scale.
We're hiring for our own rocketship, adding new roles including:
- Investment Relations Associate
and more coming soon!
Come and apply here or email us at investments@ten13.vc to register interest.
Hiring across the Portfolio:
📈 Carted is hiring a Growth and Operations Associate, Senior Software Engineer and a Head of Product!
💹 Mr. Yum is hiring a Director of Growth Operations
💻 Go1 is hiring a Software Engineering Manager
👩💻 Officely is hiring Software Engineers
📋 Preezie is hiring a Head of Sales
🦄 Chipper Cash are looking for a VP Product, a Revenue Strategy Manager and multiple engineering managers.
Farewell Doug!
On a sad note, we farewelled our Head of Platform, Doug Oliver, from TEN13’s crew in late January. He has delivered such an incredible contribution to TEN13 since joining, including managing our newly vamped website and creative, managing community, events, deal ops, and more! TEN13 certainly wouldn’t be where it is without your contribution.
Whilst we are sad to see you go, we couldn’t be more excited to follow Doug's adventures in San Francisco in the Web3, Crypto and Gaming communities and look forward to visiting him over in SF on our TEN13 investor mission (more on this below) before too long. All the best mate!
Start investing with TEN13
We are always looking for new investors to join us at TEN13, if you're interested you can begin the signup process and receive our info pack by signing up on our website. Sophisticated Investors only.
At this point, we can currently only accept Sophisticated Investors (that are Australian & New Zealand residents).
Start investing here.